


it's not living (if it's not with you)

by brella



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Groundhog Day (1993) Fusion, Background Relationships, Developing Relationship, M/M, Slow Burn, Snow, TV News, Time Loop, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 22:18:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18455726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: “How long have you known me?” Kei demands.“I… a day? We—”“Yamaguchi,” Kei says, and Yamaguchi instantly stops talking. “Listen to me. This is the third time I’m living through this day.”“Huh?” Yamaguchi repeats, much louder this time.Misanthropic Tokyo weatherman Tsukishima Kei is sent to a remote mountain village to cover the Spring Festival for the fourth year in a row—and finds himself stuck in a time loop. What Happens Next Will Warm Your Heart.

AGroundhog DayAU.





	it's not living (if it's not with you)

**Author's Note:**

> In September of 2018, I was watching _Groundhog Day_ with my boyfriend, because we love _Groundhog Day_. What I was doing in this situation could best be described as minding my own damn business, so I did not deserve to have him turn to me and say, "So, is this going to be your next Tsukkiyama AU?" I didn't deserve that at all. And yet I have been wrestling with this monstrosity (the fic, not my boyfriend) on-and-off every single month since then, and now here we are, with 107 pages of it in my Google Drive. 
> 
> To call this an exercise in self-indulgence would be an understatement, but that sounds way more scholarly than, "I just really wanted to write about Tsukishima Kei getting stuck in a time loop because he can't admit he likes someone." Perhaps if I am lucky one of you out there will also enjoy this concept.
> 
> Watching _Groundhog Day_ is not necessary to understand this, but it will definitely help you recognize some of the jokes! Because oh, boy, I pulled a lot. But about two-thirds of the way through, it started to take on a life of its own. Sorry, Bill Murray. This was originally supposed to be set in Karuizawa, but then I kept writing about things happening that would be geographically impossible in Karuizawa, but it was too late to change them, so now it's kind of a different version of Karuizawa. 
> 
> My very deepest thanks go to Meg, for so many things, things larger than this goofy fic, but especially for helping me find Yamaguchi's favorite color. To Marks, because my need to torment her far exceeds my lack of confidence and self-discipline, and also because every time I was down or frustrated I’d read something she wrote and feel okay again. And to Lily, for promising me in great detail that all of my messy drafts were good and worthwhile, not just once, but FOUR times, even when I was feeling so frustrated that I had to crawl into her DMs and whine about it. And to Discord user RarePairHell, who taught me about mayfly nymphs. And also to everyone on Twitter who continues to follow me after countless gripey tweets about my progress, rather than, you know, blocking me, which would have been wise and valid. Now I can finally shut up... finally...... finally I can shut up.........!
> 
> Extra special thanks to [the Florence soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/album/2xMKyr0YLQXl6GidebXd5s?si=8znF7hvtRmmlSpaTQ5wT6Q), to Miki Matsubara's ["Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-KAY_Glmn4) and to The 1975's ["It's Not Living (If It's Not With You)."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqoXU583vsY)
> 
> And, most importantly (to me anyway), this fic has a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/tacobrell/playlist/5rZGWH4bWZGMM4wJRinDoL?si=cYRPyDuFTSGRGWTB_RsE1A) that will hopefully guide you through to the end. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy it!

_It’s familiar_  
_But not too familiar  
_ _But not too not familiar_

— The Long Winters, “(It’s a) Departure”

 

*

 

“Good morning. Today is February 2, and it has not snowed here in Tokyo for over a week. The weather today will be seasonably chilly—northwesterly winds will be reaching up to 32 kilometers per hour—with early morning sun giving way to clouds in the afternoon. Temperatures will be in the -6 to -7 range with lows of -12 after dark. A storm is approaching on the kogarashi from the northwest into the southeast, but—and this is just a guess—it will not be reaching the Saitama or Nagano prefectures, and will instead veer off toward Fukushima and Tochigi. Good for us. Thank you for your attention.”

“Thank you, Tsukishima-kun! That _is_ good news. So. You won’t be appearing on this station tomorrow; is that right?”

“Ah. Correct. Tomorrow is Risshun. I’ll be traveling to Karuizawa to report on the festivities.”

“There’s nothing like a little rural charm to put us all in the mood for spring! Tokyo has its own Setsubun celebrations, as we all know, but you’ve been going to Karuizawa for—three years now?”

“Four, Kinoshita-san. Four.”

“You must really love it!”

“...”

“Tsukishima-kun?”

“Deeply.”

“Thank you for watching! Next we have Hibarida Fuki-san to tell us about the prospects for this year’s All-Japan Junior Star Dream Match later this month. TV Asahi is broadcasted to you with the assistance of the following sponsors…”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“That was good, Tsukishima,” Ennoshita says.

Tsukishima Kei looks up from the button on his cuff to give his director a withering look. The two of them are standing just off the soundstage, periodically shifting out of the way to let technicians and other newscasters through, and Kei has probably never wanted to be anywhere less in his entire life.

He had gotten no sleep last night, too busy thinking about the misery that awaited him in the days to follow—for “the days to follow” meant February, and February meant Risshun, and Risshun always, inevitably, no matter how nobly or viciously he fought it, meant Karuizawa.

“It was terrible, Ennoshita-san,” he deadpans. “Next time you want me to smile more, maybe don’t have Narita hold up a sign saying it. It’s distracting.”

“And for all that distraction you still didn’t obey.” Ennoshita sighs. “Remind me why you thought public broadcasting would suit you, Tsukishima?”

“It pays money,” Kei recites, “and money is necessary for living.”

“So is happiness, you know,” Ennoshita says. “Vigor. A pleasant attitude. Anything.”

“When do you want us on the road?” Kei asks before Ennoshita can continue to lecture him on how to be happy, which he hates. “And who are you saddling me with this year?”

Ennoshita shakes his head, but relents, lifting a few sheets up from the clipboard in his hands and scanning the text.

“You’re not going to like it,” he says.

“When have I ever liked it?”

“Fair.” Ennoshita lets the pages fall again. “Hinata and Kageyama.”

“You were right,” Kei says. “I don’t like it.”

“I told you.”

Kei’s fingers coming to rest on the bridge of his nose, bumping against the frames of his glasses.

“We only need one camera; it’s not Sanja Matsuri. Are they truly so simple-minded that it takes two of them to operate it?”

“Yes,” Ennoshita says, which is maybe the most honest he’s been all morning. “It’ll be fine. You know that when the two of them _do_ team up on the camerawork, it’s always the best we’ve ever had. Like they’re one body, or something.”

“I’m amazed they can even add up to one brain.”

“Very funny.” It does not sound like Ennoshita thinks it is funny. He glances at the sheet again. “Yamaguchi’s your producer on this one. He’ll be going, too.”

Kei blinks at the unfamiliar name. “Yamaguchi?”

“Yamaguchi Tadashi,” Ennoshita says, like that’s supposed to explain it. “He came on at the same time you did.”

“Yamaguchi… Tadashi…?” Kei repeats, weighing it, and trails off. No, he definitely doesn’t know that person. Must be from a different show.

Ennoshita jerks his thumb to the right. Kei follows the line to see a young man in jeans and a sweater inspecting the blue screen where the weather reports are recorded. He looks like he’s about the same age as Kei, and near-equally tall, which is impressive (Kei is very tall; they had almost refused to hire him for it, as his body is difficult to fit in frame). His short mop of brown hair has a strand sticking up near the crown like he forgot to comb it down this morning. He braces his hands on his knees when he bends over to look at something more closely as an elementary schooler might inspect a stag beetle.

Even from this distance, Kei can make out a scattering of freckles on his face and neck.

He swiftly looks away.

“Oh, that’s right. You haven’t worked with Yamaguchi yet, have you? He’s very nice.” Ennoshita doesn’t even look up from his clipboard, but Kei still kind of feels the Ennoshita Look bearing down on him, that one that expects too much and yet gets it, every time. “Please extend him the same courtesy.”

Kei looks back to the soundstage. Yamaguchi is now posing in front of the blue screen and grinning at the tiny TV inlaid in the adjacent wall, observing with delight how his equally blue sweater is causing the camera to overlay his body with the weather map and make his hands float.

“I think you’ll all have fun together,” Ennoshita says. “In fact, since Narita’s already covering you for the 10:00 tomorrow, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind taking the 5:00, too, if you wanted to stay in Karuizawa for a bit. Yamaguchi has some ideas for other material you can film.”

When he catches Kei looking at him, Yamaguchi perks up and waves. He’s got a round, pleasant face and a brilliant smile, but there’s an undercurrent of hesitation to every movement, like he’s afraid someone’s going to laugh at him. One of the spotlights glints in his brown eyes and makes them look ablaze and golden, a sight that sends a subtle twinge to Kei’s chest.

“Hm. Yeah,” Kei says to Ennoshita. “‘Fun.’” He looks him dead in the eyes. “I will be back for the 5:00.”

Ennoshita glances at Yamaguchi, then at Kei, then shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

In his twenty-three years of living, Kei has never had any trouble with suiting himself. It is perhaps the most well-honed tool in his repertoire. Had he not developed this skill, he would be like the station’s manager, Yachi Hitoka, whose indispensability frequently comes at the expense of her self-preservation. Kei is not certain she even knows what self-preservation is.

His illustrious career as a weatherman at one of Tokyo’s flagship news stations had started in college. He had taken a journalism class at an academic advisor’s behest, supposedly because “he might find himself enjoying it,” although Kei had suspected that it was because that advisor had been so desperate to make him enjoy _anything_ that they’d just been throwing darts to see where they’d land.

By coincidence, the class had led to the possibility of a summer internship, which had led to a part-time position as a sound engineer, which had led to a postgrad apprenticeship with the daytime weather anchor, Bokuto Koutarou.

“You have to feel it, Tsukishima,” he would always say in that braying voice of his, jabbing at Kei’s chest, presumably over what he thought was Kei’s heart, even though his hand was on the wrong side.

“I have to feel the weather?”

“No, no! Well, yeah, kind of! All that is to say that you, um, have to… feel… what you’re saying! Yeah!”

“About the weather.”

“Well, when you say it like that—!”

“Bokuto-san, you’re on in five.”

“Akaashi! I’m trying to mentor the hatchling!”

Bokuto has since moved on to a different department, and in his stead the position of daytime weatherman had been entrusted to Kei. Kei’s backup, Narita Kazuhito, is in charge of posting the reports on social media and rarely sees the camera, but is occasionally summoned to fill Kei’s shoes in emergencies, such as Risshun.

Kei’s attitude toward his job could be called… nonchalant, in polite terms. In less polite terms, it could be called lazy. And yet here he is.

Kei had been hired as an intern at the same time as several others, among them Hinata Shouyou and Kageyama Tobio, both presently camera technicians. Hinata in particular had had dreams of being a news anchor, possibly the only news anchor in all of Japan, if he played his cards right, but had been relegated to a behind-the-scenes role due to “unmanageable amounts of energy.”

Unmanageable amounts of energy, and Kageyama.

It had turned out that his synergy with the obstinate Kageyama when it came to working film equipment had given the station some of the most dynamic footage it had seen in years. Hinata and Kageyama have been sent all over, in all conditions, to cover stories in Japan and beyond, and have always returned with something incredible.

Kei is not sure how they manage this each and every time, as they are both alarmingly stupid. Every aspect of being a competent person is something with which they almost constantly struggle. They argue with each other over the most nonsensical things like they’ll shrivel up and die if they stop (or like they are trying to prove to onlookers that they are not attracted to each other, which they absolutely are, Kei had concluded after knowing them for fifteen minutes). They bungle up things like figuring out train routes and using the coffee machine. They can scarcely read any kanji over the fourth-grade level. They find singularly creative ways to injure themselves doing mundane everyday tasks. The scope of their vocabulary on a good day begins and ends at the word “dumbass.”

And yet, when they’re both behind the camera, they transform. They become very quiet. Their instincts and their implicit trust in one another sharpen to a glinting edge. It’s been said that no one can hold a candle to them, and whether or not Kei agrees (he doesn’t), it is quite possibly the most annoying thing that he has ever had the misfortune of witnessing.

“It’s the best feeling in the world,” Hinata had told him once, with a profound and unnerving look in his eyes that made them look miles deep, about to swallow Kei whole. “Showing people stuff like this. Finding it before anybody else can. Isn’t it?”

Kei doesn’t feel particularly strongly about his work one way or the other, and certainly not like _that_. It’s standing in front of a blank screen and pretending not only that clouds are there, but that they are worth talking about.

His is the face that Tokyo associates with the bad news that yes, it will be raining again today, for the tenth day in a row. And yet somehow, he has heard from his colleagues that he has some fans among their viewership, those who appreciate his straightforward manner and lack of reliance on “smoke and mirrors” to make the weather interesting. Apparently his candid personality is “reassuring.”

To his coworkers, however, that personality has been qualified less frequently as “reassuring” and more frequently as “stingy,” “disagreeable,” “antagonistic,” and “deliberately nasty.”

After some further thought, buttoning up his coat in the break room before stepping outside, he realizes that he _has_ seen Yamaguchi before. Probably at some orientation or another, or on a lunch break, or backstage. He’d started as an assistant to the nighttime news team, always running around with an armful of papers or a cup of tea or coffee or a cold compress, his brow steeled with resolve but his crumpled mouth betraying him.

Or maybe it had only betrayed him to Kei. Aside from being disagreeable, aside from being straightforward, and aside from being lazy, Kei is also very, very observant.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The asphalt in the parking lot is wet and bright, with patches of it still frozen, when Kei walks to the van. Kageyama and Hinata are already there, chatting animatedly with the person Kei now knows is Yamaguchi.

Well, Hinata is doing most of the chatting. Kageyama is standing stonily next to him, staring intently at Yamaguchi in that way that he does when he’s trying to seem like he’s paying attention but is actually thinking about whether or not there’s still time to get milk from the vending machine in the third-floor break room before they have to leave.

Yamaguchi and Hinata seem to already be getting along. Yamaguchi nods enthusiastically at something Hinata says and Hinata throws his arms in the air to gesticulate with more energy.

“Good morning,” Kei says when he reaches them. It’s freezing outside, with an intermittent wind that seems to slice right through his four layers of clothing, so he is not pleased, and it carries through to his cadence accidentally.

Kageyama grunts in greeting. Hinata drops his arms to his sides and the grin vanishes from his face, replaced by a thoroughly disgruntled frown in a matter of seconds.

Yamaguchi lifts his head at the sound of Kei’s voice and turns around. He’s wearing a charcoal overcoat and a bright vermillion scarf. _Fashionable_ , Kei thinks.

“Yamaguchi, this is Tsukishima,” Hinata says, extending his arm to present Kei like he’s a particularly interesting circus animal. “He’s the devil. I’ll protect you.”

Yamaguchi laughs, fanning one hand. “I’m sure I can handle it. He doesn’t look that scary.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Hinata says gravely.

His messy hair is sticking up in assorted directions from his black beanie. He’s wearing an enormous orange puffer vest over a plaid wool shirt that looks like it’s the same brand as the one Kageyama’s got on under his parka but a different color scheme.

 _Less fashionable_ , Kei thinks.

“You know that I’m right here,” he deadpans. “You must realize this.”

Hinata pulls down one eyelid and sticks out his tongue and says, “Beh.”

Yamaguchi bows and, when he rises again, extends his hand. His mittens match his scarf.

“N-Nice to meet you, Tsukishima-san,” he says, smiling pleasantly. His nose and ears are red at the tips from the chill, and his breath streams into a cloud when he speaks. “I’m—”

“Yamaguchi,” Kei fills in for him, shaking his hand briefly and lightly. The mittens are soft. “I know. Tsukishima is fine.”

Yamaguchi blinks at him, mouth still open, wrist still frozen in the air when Kei lets go of it. After a moment, he glances down at his hand, drops it, and brushes it on his pants leg.

What for? They’re both wearing gloves, aren’t they? Whatever.

“Who’s driving?” Kei asks the group. Kageyama doesn’t have a license, so that rules him out.

“Yamaguchi and I flipped a coin,” Hinata says with a pointed glare in Kei’s direction. “We’re going to split it.”

“I’m driving us there and Hinata’s driving us back,” Yamaguchi chimes in. “All of the bags and equipment are already loaded in, so…”  

Kei is at the front passenger side door before he’s finished speaking.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Yamaguchi is a capable driver, Kei decides within half an hour of riding with him. It is a pleasant change of pace from Hinata’s devil-may-care approach to speed limits and lane usage. They make good time getting through the city and are cruising along the highway soon enough. It will take three hours to reach Karuizawa.

They can’t pass slowly enough. Kei churlishly turns up the heat, tugging his collar up around his chin.

“So,” Yamaguchi says in a way that’s far too obviously trying to make friendly conversation. “Ennoshita told me you’ve done Karuizawa for the past three years, Tsukishima-sa—um, Tsukishima. That’s amazing!”

“He hates it,” Hinata pipes up before Kei can respond. “Doing it with him is the worst thing… maybe ever?”

Kageyama nods sagely beside him. Kei would argue, but there’s no reason to.

“Hating it is an acceptable response, you know,” he says plainly. “You do realize it’s considered _abnormal_ , actually, to enjoy freezing to death in some provincial resort town in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ve never been,” Yamaguchi says hesitantly. “To Karuizawa, I mean.”

“Prepare to be disappointed.”

“They do Setsubun totally differently there than they do in Tokyo,” Hinata interjects. “The temple is super old and kind of small, but they still pick people to dress up like oni and let everyone throw their beans at them together! Plus I’ve heard they even put spinach and sardine heads outside their doors!”

“It’s holly and sardine heads, dumbass!” Kageyama barks, elbowing Hinata in the side. “Spinach? Are you stupid?”

“Holly and sardine heads…” Yamaguchi repeats, wide-eyed.

“Provincial,” Kei mutters, for emphasis.

Yamaguchi glances aside at him with something unidentifiable furrowing his brow. He’s giving most of his attention to the road, however, and Kei sort of wishes Hinata would take note so he could learn something.

“You don’t like Risshun?” There’s a measure of caution in his voice.

“No,” Kei replies, “I don’t. It’s idiotic.”

Hinata kicks the back of Kei’s seat, making his glasses pitch into his lap. “Tsukishima, don’t be such a—”

“I think it’s nice,” Yamaguchi says.

Kei puts his glasses back on. Yamaguchi’s fingers are clenching the steering wheel a bit too tightly.  

“When I was little,” Yamaguchi says, “my mom used to take me to the shrine every year. Fighting off the oni always made me feel kind of brave. What’s so idiotic about cleaning out bad spirits, starting things over?”

“By throwing beans at some geriatric shop owner who got paid 5,000 yen to put on an oni mask?”

Yamaguchi could not be more obviously trying to conceal his reluctant amusement. The edges of his mouth are dimpling with the effort.

“It’s—it’s a timeless tradition; it’s _fun_ ,” he insists. “It makes people happy. People _like_ it.”

“People like natto, too,” Kei says. “People are morons.”

“ _I_ like natto,” Hinata squawks indignantly.

“And?”

“You wanna fight, Tsukishima?!”

“Quiet down a little,” Yamaguchi tells them. He jabs his thumb over his shoulder toward the back seat. “Kageyama’s asleep.”

Yamaguchi and Hinata chat about what’s been going on in TV lately, about their hometowns, and about their favorite holidays. Hinata’s is Tanabata and Yamaguchi’s is New Year’s. Yamaguchi is from some town outside Sendai and Hinata is from… well, Kei doesn’t care where Hinata is from.

Word on the grapevine is that a crew from one of their rival stations will be in Karuizawa this year as well, and that they’ll have to be on their toes if they want to broadcast the superior coverage. This mere hint of a suggestion of competition is enough to get Hinata fired up in about three seconds flat.

Kei has found that many things are able to achieve this effect—live sports games, bad shounen anime, flash sales on meat at the grocery store, expensive sneakers… and “winning,” as a concept. If given the slightest opportunity to _win_ at something, be it running up the stairs faster than Kageyama or capturing better footage than another channel (typically at the expense of his physical safety), Hinata will pursue it with single-minded resolve.

Kei finds this type of needlessly hot-blooded behavior excruciatingly annoying in any person, but especially in people who display it like Hinata does: without the slightest regard for eardrums.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei says abruptly as they pass Honjo, unable to take it anymore, “I’m hungry.”

He isn’t, actually. Not really. But one of the easiest ways to redirect Hinata (or Kageyama, for that matter) is to mention food.

“Ooh, me, too!” Hinata chirps, rummaging around in the pocket of his vest and producing his ramshackle smartphone. “Want me to see if there are any service areas coming up?”

“S-Sure,” Yamaguchi says, still seemingly bewildered at having heard Kei say his name. “Actually, I have some snacks in the glove compartment, Tsukishima, if you want to see if there’s anything you’d like.”

“He’s like a little boy,” Hinata whispers, wiping a false tear from his eye.

Yamaguchi, to Kei’s horror, snickers.

“Don’t laugh,” Kei says, betrayed. “Don’t _laugh_ at him.”

“Aw, do you need a snacky?” Hinata coos, jostling Kei’s seat with his foot. “I hope Yamaguchi-san brought your favorites!”

Yamaguchi snickers _again_. “Don’t worry about that. Our Tsukki will be well taken care of!”

Kei’s brain powers down.

“What,” he says, “did you just call me?”

There is a strained, prodigious silence. Hinata lets out a squeak that Kei quickly realizes is one of amusement rather than fear. An unmissable blush has begun to crawl up Yamaguchi’s neck. Kageyama lets out a loud, abrupt snore.

“Um,” Yamaguchi says. “Um.”

“ _Tsukki_!” Hinata brays out, his shrill cackle piercing the atmosphere. “Bwahaha— _ha_ —it doesn’t suit him at _all_!”

“Pipe down, dumbass! Don’t you know people are trying to sleep?!”

Kageyama’s back, as though he’d never been asleep at all. Hinata, eyes watery with laughter, wheezes and points at Kei’s back.

“Ts— _Tsukki_ …” he rasps.

Kageyama immediately wrinkles his nose. “Hah? Disgusting.”

“Y-Yamaguchi-san called him _Tsukki_ ,” Hinata cries. “Don’t do things like that! It m-makes him sound s-so human!” He erupts into another peal of laughter, throwing his tiny head back and clutching his stomach.

“All _right_ ,” Kei growls. Reboot successful. “It’s not _that_ funny.”

“It’s pretty funny,” Kageyama says with a perfectly straight face.

“I’m sorry, was that overstepping? That was overstepping, wasn’t it?” Yamaguchi babbles, gesturing frantically with one hand. “I-It just sort of came out, you know; I wasn’t even—I apologize—I didn’t think—”

“That’s obvious,” Kei says. Yamaguchi flinches. “Whatever. Forget about it. I don’t care what you call me.”

Hinata and Kageyama give him a puzzled look; he sees it in the rear view mirror. After a second or two, Hinata’s eyes dart to Yamaguchi, then to Kei, then back to Yamaguchi again.

And then he grins.

“If you say so, _Tsukki_ —”

“Use that name on me ever again,” Kei says to Hinata’s reflection, “and I’ll curse you to shrink by ten centimeters every year, until you’re a microbe.”

“Nice try,” Hinata retorts, turning his head to look out the window, “but I know you can’t do curses, Tsukishim—”

And then he unleashes a bloodcurdling scream.

“HINATA, WHAT THE HELL?” Kageyama shouts.

“YAMAGUCHI, PULL OVER! PULL OVER!”

“WHAT?!” Yamaguchi yelps, accidentally swerving the van. Kei’s head smacks into the window. “WHY?! WHAT? WHAT’S WRONG?”

“BUG!” Hinata howls. “A BUG! A BUG! KAGEYAMA, KILL IT!”

“MORON, _YOU_ KILL IT!”

“I’M NOT GONNA—GAH! IT’S ON THE WINDOW! _IT’S ON THE WINDOW_!”

“HOW CAN THERE BE A BUG IN THE CAR?” Yamaguchi yells. “IT’S THE MIDDLE OF WINTER!”

“I DON’T KNOW!” Hinata wails. “YAMAGUCHI, ROLL DOWN THE WINDOW _RIGHT NOW_!”

“AND GET SNOW ON THE EQUIPMENT, DUMBASS?! ARE YOU STUPID?”

“SHUT UP, KAGEYAMA!”

“I-I’M PULLING OVER! I’M PULLING—”

The van veers off onto the shoulder, swaying when Yamaguchi pumps the brakes. Everyone jolts forward; Kei’s seatbelt cuts into his chest. Yamaguchi fumbles for the gear selector, yanks it into park, and sits there, his hand frozen on it, pale-faced and panting.

No one speaks, but Hinata is whimpering in the back seat. Kei closes his eyes, breathes in for three seconds, and opens them again, unbuckling his seatbelt and twisting around in his seat.

“Where is the bug,” he says to a cowering Hinata as calmly as he can.

Hinata points to a dark speck on the window, flattening himself further against Kageyama, who’s leaned all the way against the passenger door and is staring distrustfully at the insect in question.

Kei squints. “What are you so scared of? It’s just a mayfly nymph.”

“It’s _creepy_!” Hinata whines, and next to him, Kageyama nods vigorously.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Kei mutters.

“How big is it?” Yamaguchi asks, but he doesn’t sound freaked out—he sounds fascinated.

“Huge!”

“Average,” Kei says over Hinata’s distressed response.

“Kill it, Tsukishima,” Kageyama orders him.

Yamaguchi whirls around with a gasp. “No, you can’t—”

“I am not going to kill it,” Kei says, quieting Yamaguchi. “And where do you get off telling me what to do, Your Majesty? Just— _ugh_.”

With a tremendous, long-suffering sigh, he rubs his hands together quickly to generate some warmth and opens the door, hauling himself out onto the road. He tromps around the back of the van as other cars go whizzing by, grimacing against the sharp, nipping wind. Hinata and Kageyama watch him, two sets of round, idiot eyes riveted owlishly onto him when he appears at the window on Hinata’s side.

The mayfly nymph is still there, minding its own business, its wings erect. Were it not oppressively freezing outside, Kei wouldn’t mind watching it for a little while.

He remembers reading in one of the insect encyclopedias that Akiteru had given him when he was little that mayfly nymphs don’t live for more than a few days, so it’s not like he’ll be saving it from much by sheltering it from Hinata—but still…

Carefully, he opens the door, enough that he can maneuver himself into the opening without obstructing traffic. Hinata lets out an “ _eep_ ,” scrambling even closer to Kageyama, such that he’s practically in his lap; Kei suspects that Kageyama’s increasingly panicked expression is no longer because of the bug.

The mayfly nymph shrinks at the wind when it gusts in, and Kei clicks his tongue in self-deprecation at subjecting it to such conditions. He reaches toward it, gingerly nudges his finger into its side, and remains perfectly still as it clambers onto the tip.

“You’re letting it _touch you_?!” Hinata yells.

“Gross,” Kageyama breathes, both revolted and impressed.

Kei makes sure to scowl at them before slamming the door shut again and drawing his hand close to his chest to block the wind. He walks over to some barren trees and brown grass on the side of the highway, dispenses the mayfly nymph safely onto a branch, and returns to the van.

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” Hinata murmurs when Kei’s putting his seatbelt back on, “but I owe you my life, Tsukishima.”

“All he did was put the bug outside,” Kageyama says. “ _I_ could’ve done that.”

Hinata glares at him. “Then why didn’t you?!”

“To show your gratitude, you can promise me that you will not speak for the rest of this drive,” Kei says, reaching to crank up the heat.

He’s expecting pushback, but Hinata just beams at him, scrunched eyes and bright teeth, and says, “Deal!”

It’s only then that Kei notices that Yamaguchi hasn’t spoken or moved since he’d stepped out of the van. He lifts his head to fix Yamaguchi with a questioning look, but falters: Yamaguchi is staring right at him.

For some reason, Kei can think of no more suitable response than to stare back like a complete idiot. He holds it, absorbing Yamaguchi’s earth-brown eyes and dotted nose, his parted lips and faint blush. He tries to swallow, but his throat is dry.

“What?” he blurts out, suddenly self-conscious.

Yamaguchi blinks rapidly, mouth opening wider and then closing. He flexes his fingers on the steering wheel and swiftly whips his head away toward the driver’s side wing mirror so that his face is hidden.

“N-Nothing,” he stutters. He turns the keys in the ignition, switches on his turn signal, and shifts the van back into drive.

He merges back onto the freeway after a few seconds when a produce truck slows down to let him in. True to his word, Hinata doesn’t make a peep for the remainder of the journey, falling asleep with Kageyama in the back seat and drooling onto his puffer vest.

They don’t end up stopping at a service area; Karuizawa is only another hour away anyway. Kei grips the coat hanger overhead and lets his arm dangle, eyes roving over the landscape as the urban views dwindle into many foreseeable miles of cloudy sky and huddled, evergreen trees.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They pull into Karuizawa just after four. It’s overcast, textureless clouds and mountain mist turning the daylight silver, but there’s no sign of an imminent storm, just as Kei had predicted. Patches of fresh snow accent the sidewalks and rooftops, seeming to glitter as people stroll by them with leeks sticking out of their grocery bags and cans of hot coffee in their gloved hands.

It looks the same as ever: quaint and picturesque and serene. Kei is disgusted.

Yamaguchi has reserved rooms for them at a classic family-run inn that’s been there for decades, far enough removed from the shopping district to be passably peaceful. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk from the shrine.

“Hinata and Kageyama, your rooms are next door to each other on the second floor,” he says in the lobby, passing each of them a room key. “Tsukishima, you’re on the first floor toward the back; they told me it’s quieter there.”

Kei takes the key Yamaguchi proffers him without saying anything, jolting inwardly when their fingertips touch. What is _happening_?

“What about you, Yamaguchi-san?” Hinata asks in the midst of his and Kageyama’s squabble over who should get which room number, as if it matters, at all.

Yamaguchi scratches lightly at his cheek, glancing at the floor. “Um, the only other rooms they had available were near the baths, so…”

“No!” Hinata exclaims.

“Noisy,” Kei mutters.

“It’s no problem!” Yamaguchi insists, giving him a thumbs-up. “After all, we’re just going to be here for one night—right, Tsukishima?”

“I wanna stay for two,” Hinata whines before Kei can answer. “If Stingyshima wants to go back to Tokyo so bad, he can just walk.”

“Well, I’m going to go get settled,” Yamaguchi says, slipping his own key into the pocket of his jeans. He glances over at Kei and sets a hand on the back of his neck. “U-Um, Tsukishima—Hinata and Kageyama and I were going to get some hot sake after dinner, if you want to joi—”

“No, thank you,” Kei says curtly, hefting up his single travel bag. “I’m going to bed.”

“Old man,” Hinata sneers.

“To bed?” Yamaguchi blinks. “You’re not going to eat?”

“I’ll have them bring it,” Kei says. “What time do you want us at the shrine tomorrow?”

Yamaguchi frowns at him for a moment longer before checking his smartphone. “We’re meeting for breakfast at seven-thirty, then getting to the shrine by eight to set up the equipment. The ritual starts at nine.”

“Be sure to make your alarm extra-loud, Yamaguchi-san!” Hinata chirps, and Yamaguchi lets out a bashful laugh.

Kei wants to make Yamaguchi laugh, too. What.

“Good night,” he says brusquely so that he won’t have to dwell on that in front of witnesses.

Hinata and Kageyama grunt at him, already halfway to the stairs, but Yamaguchi lingers, eyes on Kei’s back. Kei pretends not to notice, glancing at the room number on his key and making his way to the hallway to the east rooms.

“Good night, Tsukishima,” he thinks he hears Yamaguchi say quietly behind him, but maybe it’s his imagination.

 

 

* * *

 

 

His room is typical and traditional, with tatami flooring and a closet with four rolled-up futons and a kotatsu that, judging by the ugly floral pattern, hasn’t been replaced in a handful of decades.

There’s a sliding door to a narrow deck overlooking some of the surrounding forest; two wooden chairs face each other over a square table. Yamaguchi hadn’t been kidding; it really is quiet. Peaceful, almost.

Kei recoils from the window view, wrinkling his nose. He did _not_ just describe this place as _peaceful_.

He doesn’t bother unpacking, but he does take a short nap and watch some TV. He has room service bring him omurice and eats it alone, grateful that he is not down in the bar with Hinata and Kageyama, who, he knows from a single experience he has made it a point never to repeat, are possibly the last people in the entire country of Japan who should be given alcohol.

He’s never enjoyed public baths, so that’s out. He puts on his headphones and scrolls through his phone for a while, reading a random assortment of Wikipedia articles and yawning intermittently, and then takes a shower, letting the water run just a little longer than he would at home.

He considers it the best luxury he can hope for in a place like this. Vacation taken, Ennoshita.

He brushes his teeth and settles into his futon just after ten, looks at his phone a little more, listens to some music, and finally folds up his glasses, puts them neatly in their case, sets the alarm on the room’s radio for 7:00 AM, and rolls over to go to sleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“ _Stay with me… I knock on the door at midnight—I cried without going home—that season is now right in front of you—stay with me_ …”

“Good morning, Karuizawa! Don’t rush to get out of bed, now, because it’s _cold_ out there this morning—”

“It’s _cold_ out there every morning!”

Kei pokes his head out from where he had burrowed it under the quilt, squinting at the formless blur that is the ceiling.

Is that song… it can’t be Matsubara Miki. It can’t be. Surely that would be too much, even for this place.

“Freezing,” he mumbles, curling his toes.

“Today is February 3rd, and you know what that means—it’s Risshun, the spring Setsubun! Preparations are already underway for the oni purification rite at Kumanokotai Shrine this morning at nine o’clock sharp; be sure not to miss it!”

“I can’t believe it’s that time again; can you?”

“I sure can’t!”

“So exciting! Reprising their roles as oni this year are Nishin—”

“Quiet,” Kei groans, fumbling blindly for the radio.

At last his hand finds the proper button and he slams it down, absorbing the blessed silence that ensues. Who decided that chipper people should run the news, anyway? Isn’t that kind of disingenuous?

He lies cocooned in his quilt for a few minutes, staring blearily at the window. The vaguely brown blobs against the mass of white are probably the chairs. Probably.

With a sigh, he gropes across the floor, finds his glasses, and slips them on, pushing himself up.

The chill hits his back harshly enough that he tenses. Did the heater break? Figures. This damn hotel is lucky he didn’t freeze to death.

He brushes his teeth again, washes his face, and dawdles a little getting dressed (the same white dress shirt, the same gray slacks, the same black cardigan) before walking to the dining room. Most of the tables are occupied by elderly couples and families with children, all chatting pleasantly in the morning light.

He finds the others soon enough—all he has to do is follow the sounds of Hinata’s delighted reactions to what is no doubt his breakfast. They’re seated at a table near the center of the room. Not even next to a window. Probably a wise idea, anyway, to keep Hinata and Kageyama away from anything made of glass. As expected of Yamaguchi.

“Good morning, Tsukishima,” Yamaguchi chirps as Kei sits down across from him. He’s wearing an olive sweater over a dress shirt patterned with tiny dinosaurs. A crime.

“Grrfmrrfnrrf,” Hinata says.

Kei recoils from the sight of his rice-stuffed cheeks. “Incredible. I thought there were no animals permitted indoors.”

“How did you sleep?” Yamaguchi asks.  

Kei clutches onto his grumpiness for dear life, even as Yamaguchi’s smile directly attacks it. “My heater broke in the middle of the night.”

Yamaguchi’s features sink. “Oh, no—I’m sorry.”

Kei rolls his eyes and busies himself with what remains of the food. There’s one helping of dried horse mackerel and a bowl of steamed rice left, and a decent amount of barley tea still in the pot. He’ll take what he can get.

“What are you sorry for?” he mutters. “You didn’t break it.”

Yamaguchi falters. He slowly lowers his chopsticks, resting his wrist on the edge of the table, and says nothing.

As Kei picks at his food, he half-listens to Yamaguchi explain their itinerary to meet up at Kumanokotai; he, Kageyama, and Hinata will drive part of the way in the van rather than lug the equipment on foot through town, but Kei is welcome to make his way there separately if he’d prefer.

Yamaguchi shrugs. “There’s not much Tsukishima can do to help us with setting up anyway.”

“Or _would_ do,” Kageyama grumbles into his rice.

“I’ll meet you there,” Kei says. “I’d like to try out this cool thing called drinking my tea in undisturbed silence.”

“Sounds boring.” Hinata scarfs down the last of his vegetables. “Last one to the van’s a big slow loser named Kageyama!”

He takes off at breakneck speed just as Kageyama leaps out of his seat.

“Damn it, Hinata! Dumbass! That’s not _faaaaiiiiiir_ …!” And he takes off, too, roar fading into the distance.

Yamaguchi watches them go. “Ah.”

“Good luck with that,” Kei deadpans, taking a long drink of the tea. “You know, another advantage to getting out of here quicker is that it’ll give them less time to destroy the entire village.”

“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you?” Yamaguchi asks, and Kei has no idea what _that’s_ supposed to mean. He stands with a wave. “See you.”

Just as he had wished, Kei finishes his tea in undisturbed silence, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows across the room and thinking about nothing in particular. The waitress who comes to clear the table has an alarmed look about her, no doubt from being forced to bear witness to Hinata and Kageyama’s feeding hour. Kei feels like it might be polite to apologize on their behalf to prevent them all from being permanently banned, but he can’t muster the interest.

Not like he’ll ever be coming back.

“Will you all be checking out today as planned, Tsukishima-sama?” the old man who’s always knitting at the front desk asks. Kei thinks he’s the owner. He has a somewhat mischievous but overall kindly face, and there’s a calico cat snoozing in his lap.

Kei smiles politely at him on his way to the door, tucking his scarf into his coat.

“Chance of departure 100%,” he says.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It is so miserably, viscerally cold outside that Kei seriously considers walking right back in the way he came. But then a vision of Yamaguchi’s crestfallen face takes form in his imagination, and he turns up his collar, tugs his scarf over his chin, and pulls out his phone to look up the directions.

A ten-minute walk. Not ideal, but not torture. He’ll have to pass through the shopping district, however, and that? _That_ is torture. People are chattering and squealing about the cute storefronts and being loud, all the time.

He pulls up the drive back to Tokyo on his map to gauge the travel time as he walks, weaving among the rest of the crowd headed for the shrine. Could they theoretically make it back in time for a late lunch, if he cautiously tries to egg Hinata into speeding? Maybe he—

“Excuse me! Oi, you! Glasses! Tsukishima Kei-kun!”

Kei stops, blinking.

“Right, right, you! Over here!”

Slowly, he turns his head over his shoulder to see a guy about his age with dark hair in such an alarming state of bedhead that it resembles a rooster’s comb. He’s wearing a black wool overcoat and a crimson scarf and an easy, half-assembled smile.

“Yo,” he greets Kei.

There is something about that smile that initiates Kei’s fight-or-flight response. He can’t put his finger on what, but it’s there. A touch of recognition, too, squirming at the edge of his brain.

“Jeez, _you’re_ a hard guy to flag down,” Rooster-Hair says. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were repulsed by human contact.” He smiles, as if amused by his own joke. “Wild seeing you all the way out here. You don’t strike me as the rural type.”

Kei continues to squint dubiously at him.  

“You don’t remember me, do you?” Rooster-Hair gives a wounded sigh, bowing and shaking his head. “Kuroo Tetsurou. Channel 12? I helped Bokuto coach you at that conference last year.”

The memory returns to Kei as a boomerang to the head might. “ _Oh_.”

“Don’t sound so pleased, Tsukishima. It will make people think you’re friendly.”

Kei begins to turn right back around. “I really must be going—”

“Ah, going to film at the shrine?” Kuroo asks, loping forward to intercept him. “I guess you guys at TV Asahi always did prefer the simple approach.”

“Kuroo-san,” Kei says, “I would love to stand here and talk with you…” He forces a smile. “But I’m not going to. Please excuse me.”

He expertly maneuvers around Kuroo’s body to stride across the street. And really, he does not exaggerate when he says _expertly._ So it is an injustice of the highest order that his reward for it is dropping his leg directly into a shin-deep puddle of freezing slush when he steps off the sidewalk.

“Ooh,” Kuroo says behind him with an undoubtedly sharkish grin. “That was a pretty cool exit, Tsukishima! See you around!”

Kei does not deign to turn around. With what is left of his grievously injured pride, he hobbles the rest of the way to the shrine, one shoe squelching with each step.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The temple courtyard smells like pine and incense and is very crowded. After a few minutes of searching, Kei spots Yamaguchi’s cowlick over by some cedars and navigates his way toward it.

The three of them have set up the equipment in a prime spot, enough out of the way as to prevent dirty looks from any elderly locals, but not so far that they won’t be able to see anything. Kei hears a snatch of Hinata’s riveting argument with Kageyama about the superiority of hot milk over cold when he approaches.

“Where have you been?” Yamaguchi demands incredulously.

“It was horrible,” Kei says. “A giant leech got me.”

“You missed the oni dance!” Hinata calls from over Yamaguchi’s shoulder, where he’s perched on a tree stump like some kind of excitable monkey to more easily maneuver the camera. Kageyama is on the other side of it, periodically checking the viewfinder, wearing an especially ugly neon blue windbreaker.  

“I’m sure I’ll survive the disappointment.” Kei wipes his nose as he cranes his neck toward the main pavilion. The priests are shuffling in a circle, reciting the good luck chant.

He’s already three seconds from being asleep.

“Ah!” Hinata yells, pointing inelegantly. “There they are!”

Kageyama whacks him upside the head when several people turn to stare.

“Pipe down, moron!” he also yells.

Kei follows Hinata’s gesture to see the two “oni” prowling toward the shrine. There are two: a tall red one, who seems to be having the time of his life startling the children, if his uproarious laughter is any indication; and a pint-sized green one, who’s darting hither and yon behind him with energy that could rival Hinata’s.  

“Whoa, they have a red one and a green one!” Hinata exclaims. “So authentic!”

Kageyama isn’t saying anything, but his starry-eyed expression matches Hinata’s.

“It’s a couple of idiots in oni masks,” Kei mutters. “I don’t think they’ve stopped yelling since they got here.” He tilts his head. “Hm. One of them looks like he’s even shorter than Hinata.”

“Hah?! What’d you say?”

“He _is_ pretty short,” Yamaguchi muses.

“Yamaguchi-san, how _could_ you—”

Kei pulls out his phone to check the time. 9:28 AM. He shivers. “Can’t they get a move on?”

“Now, now,” Yamaguchi says, patting his shoulder. Kei almost jumps out of his skin. His touch is so _light_.

“The green one just did a somersault,” Kageyama exclaims in wonder.

“Are you serious?!” Hinata stands on his tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd. “That’s so _cool_!”

“Well, not like there’s much to disrupt his center of gravity,” Kei says under his breath.

Yamaguchi makes a strange coughing noise, covering his mouth with one hand.

“Okay, enough joking around,” he says, blatantly amused. “Hinata, Kageyama; get back to the camera. Tsukishima, you ready?”

“If that’s the only word I have to choose from.”

Yamaguchi shakes his head with a long, weary sigh that clouds densely in the air. While he turns to Hinata and Kageyama to test the camera, Kei straightens his coat, rubs his gloved hands together for warmth, and waits.

The morning is barely over yet and it’s already the longest morning of his life.

Like clockwork, the oni approach the temple entrance, brandishing their papier-mâché clubs. The lead priest, a young man with a square face, broad shoulders, and a grin that is somehow both congenial and intimidating, reaches into the box at his belt and proclaims, “Demons out! Good luck in!”

He tosses a fistful of beans at the red one, who groans and growls and falls dramatically down, rolling part of the way down the slope. Another young priest, this one with silvery hair and a mole under his eye, also scoops a hand into his box and repeats, with great gravitas, “Demons out! Good luck in!”

He aims for the green one, who goes through the same routine. As he collapses, the red one charges at the priests again. Kei can hear some of the kids starting to laugh; they always do right around now—tears and fears forgotten as they watch the once-scary oni flop around on the ground like fish.

The third priest, who is easily the tallest but appears to be pretty timid, if his fearful expression at the oni’s approach is any indication, fumbles for beans and stammers, “G-Good luck in; demons out; or, no, wait—”

“Just throw them, Asahi,” Silvery Hair hisses behind one hand.

The timid one chucks his beans harder than he needs to, and a couple of them, to Kei’s great chagrin, end up pelting him in the head.

“Whoa, some of them hit me!” Hinata could not sound more enthused. “Throw them again, Scary Priest-san! You missed an oni!”

“What the hell are you pointing at _me_ for?!” Kageyama barks.

This goes on for a couple more minutes, the volleying of beans and the supposedly comical toppling of the oni, before the two monsters concede defeat and stalk back down the path, shaking their fists at the cheering crowd. Kei wonders if secondhand embarrassment can be fatal.

“That was hilarious,” Yamaguchi says, beaming and applauding. “Tsukishima, come on, clap a little—”

Kei glares silently at him, which he hopes conveys his sentiments on clapping a little. Yamaguchi sighs in exasperation and jerks his head toward the patch of earth in front of the camera.

“Come on; they’ll be wrapping up soon. Let’s get you on.”

“Don’t ruin it, Producer-sama!” Hinata implores him. “This is a beautiful moment! He’ll destroy it!”

Kei ignores them, edging over to the designated spot and straightening his coat, scarf, and glasses. Yamaguchi hands him the mic; he takes it. Their fingers don’t do anything stupid like brush together this time, thank God.

Kei faces the camera and raises four fingers, counting down until only the middle one remains. “On me in three, two, one…”

Kageyama nods.

“Tsukishima Kei in Karuizawa. Good morning. And what an exciting morning it is. The Setsubun celebrations in this rustic mountain village that we all know and love are already well underway, with a crowd of over a hundred devoted locals in attendance at Kumanokotai Shrine for the much-anticipated throwing of beans at the ogres of yesteryear. With the power of this timeless chant and these dried soybeans, surely the bad luck will be driven out, bringing nothing but prosperity and joy in every single one of the 365 days ahead. I, for one, am indescribably happy to be here to witness this unprecedented event, for the fourth year in a row.”

He bows, waits for Hinata to signal that the recording has ended, and then passes the microphone back to Yamaguchi, bumping it against his chest.

“There. Done.”

“Maybe we could try it again _without_ the sarcasm?” Yamaguchi retorts with a frown, pushing the mic back.

The profound disappointment in his eyes instantly spikes Kei’s annoyance levels to the highest they’ve been in days. He shoves the microphone forcefully back to Yamaguchi once more.

“We got it,” Kei growls, jamming his hands into his pockets and stalking past the camera. “Get back to the van. I’d like to make it to Tokyo sometime in the next century.”

“Oi, don’t be such a jackass, Tsukishima!” Kageyama barks.

“The schedule doesn’t bend to your will!” Hinata chimes in angrily.

“We’re getting an early lunch in town,” Yamaguchi says to Kei’s back, prompting him to spin furiously back around. “Join us or don’t.”

Kei wouldn’t presume to be familiar enough with Yamaguchi to think that his curt tone is out of character, but he thinks it nonetheless. Standing there, halfway down the path to the temple gate, with Yamaguchi’s features arranged in the discontented way that they now are, with Yamaguchi’s eyes avoiding his, with Hinata and Kageyama glaring at him with a more complicated distaste than the one he has come to treat as a joke, he feels his cheeks grow hot with shame.

He jerks his head aside. “Whatever.”

“Want to try that restaurant we saw last night, Kageyama?” Hinata asks excitedly as he loops the cord to the portable battery around his arm.

Kageyama nods as enthusiastically as he is capable of nodding. Kei almost inquires as to which restaurant they’re speaking of, and then thankfully remembers that he doesn’t care.

“What about you, Yamaguchi?” Kageyama jabs his thumb over his shoulder. “You can come, if you want. It’s not far.”

Hinata opens his mouth as if to protest, probably because he’d been planning for it to be some sort of date where neither party is emotionally advanced enough to call it a date, but then claps it shut. Kageyama, as ever, is oblivious.

Yamaguchi blinks back at him, startled. “Oh—thanks, but I think I’m—”

“You and I can eat back at the inn,” Kei tells him. For some reason, this polite gesture causes Yamaguchi to make a strange squeaking noise. “Might as well, right?”

“M-Might as well, haha, yeah,” Yamaguchi babbles. His earlier displeasure has vanished without a trace. He addresses Kageyama and Hinata with a note of desperation. “S-So, um, then, we can all reconvene in the lobby at… one? Kageyama, why don’t you and Hinata take the van since you have the camera?”

“Roger!” Hinata crows with a cheerful salute before Kageyama can respond. “Oi, Kageyama, hurry up; I’m starving—”

Kageyama scowls at him, hefting up the camera by its pop-out handle. “So what else is new?”

“Look who’s talking!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?! Dumbass! Slow down, damn it; you’ll drop the…”

The sounds of their argument fade mercifully into the trees as they make their way back down the trail. Some disturbed birds fly out of the trees as they go.

Kei loiters in place, suddenly unable to think of a reason to walk away if Yamaguchi doesn’t do it first. Yamaguchi finishes picking up the spare cables and smaller pieces of equipment that Hinata and Kageyama hadn’t packed, puts them in his backpack, and straightens up to offer Kei a wan scrap of a smile as he hoists it onto his shoulders.

He follows a step or two behind Kei on the walk back to town without a word.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The dining room at the inn is much quieter when Kei and Yamaguchi check in for lunch. Yamaguchi gravitates toward a small two-person table next to one of the windows overlooking the central garden, with the tips of the frosted, naked branches of a maple just visible through the pane.

Kei has learned something about Yamaguchi in the day or so that he’s known him: he is a chronic fidgeter. He’s fidgeting when they’re walking to the inn, he’s fidgeting when they cross the dining room, and he’s fidgeting when they sit down. He’s fidgeting when he orders his food.

The minutiae of each are distinct and Kei falls all too quickly into cataloguing them. The thumping foot, the chewed lip, the tangled fingers. The freckles on the fingers. The—

“Sorry for being short with you earlier,” Yamaguchi mumbles suddenly to the table. “I just—”

“It makes no difference to me,” Kei says without thinking, and then mentally kicks himself for how it sounds. “I mean—well, not like that. Just. Don’t worry about it.”  

Yamaguchi chuckles uncomfortably, lifting a finger to scratch at his cheek.

“Okay; I’ll try,” he promises. “Um, if I can be frank…” Kei tries not to wince. Nothing good ever follows that phrase. “You seem like an all right person, Tsukishima.” Never mind. “I know Hinata and Kageyama are a little… _spirited_ … but they respect you. And I think you respect them, too. You make a good team.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

Yamaguchi makes that crumpled face he does when he’s trying not to let Kei know that he thinks he’s funny. “Be serious for one second.”

“I am,” Kei deadpans, staring unwaveringly into his eyes for emphasis.

Yamaguchi holds that gaze for a beat too long, then jumps a little in his chair and pretends to be fascinated by the menu.

Kei hates the word _awkward_. It’s the kind of thing people will rely on to passive-aggressively complain about his lack of social energy, as if an interaction can be saved by Kei affecting an air of manufactured friendliness rather than just being left alone. However, drumming his fingers against the table, sinking into the silence that yawns ever-wider between him and Yamaguchi as they wait for their food to arrive, he realizes that there is no better explanation for the intolerable tension in his jaw.

What does one even say to diffuse awkwardness? It was never a skill he had to learn. His personality is generally enough of a repellant that things never get this far. But it doesn’t look like Yamaguchi’s going anywhere.

“Man, it’s so much colder here than Tokyo,” Yamaguchi says eventually with a short shiver. “Even with the heat on, and everything…”

“The mountains in the middle of nowhere?” Kei asks flatly. “Colder than Tokyo? Can’t picture it.”

Yamaguchi reddens and swiftly drops his head. “Y-Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

With anyone else, that would be the end of it, but Yamaguchi is more dogged than Kei had thought.

“I wish my room had a kotatsu,” he tries again. “I think they forgot to put one in.”

“Ah, is that so?” Kei replies woodenly, trying to be polite. “Shouldn’t you complain?”

“Huh?” Yamaguchi waves his hands, shaking his head. “No, no, no. I mean, we’re only here for a day, so…”

Kei blinks. “So you deserved to be cold?”

Yamaguchi’s face does an unreadable thing. He doesn’t answer.

The waitress brings them two bowls of miso soup and unadon. Kei inspects his, trying to work up an appetite, while Yamaguchi gratefully lifts the bowl of soup with both hands.

His eyes widen a second after he takes a sip, and Kei instinctively lunges for his glass of ice water, but—

“This,” Yamaguchi whispers, “is the best miso soup I’ve ever had.”

Kei pauses, fingers hovering over the rim of his glass. “What?”

Yamaguchi points to Kei’s untouched bowl, eyes round.

Kei furrows his eyebrows more deeply, but picks it up. It looks normal; green onions, cubes of tofu at the bottom just visible when the broth shifts. He isn’t particularly moved one way or the other by the taste when he tries it. It’s not _bad_ , but it’s certainly not—

“It’s _so good_.” Yamaguchi sounds like he’s about to start crying.

“It’s fine?” Kei slides his bowl across the table. “Do… you want to finish—”

The power of Yamaguchi’s smile must stun him until he’s finished eating, because the next thing he knows, the waitress has dropped the bill at their table, both of the miso soup bowls are empty, and Yamaguchi is leaning contentedly back in his chair with his hands on his knees and a pleasant pinkness to his complexion.

Kei hasn’t even touched his unadon.

Yamaguchi scoots forward a bit. “Tsukishima, where are you from?”

“What?” Kei says brilliantly.

“Like, where you grew up,” Yamaguchi says.

Kei stares at him. What an inane question.

“Iwate,” he says. “Morioka. Is this—do you actually enjoy pointless small talk, or are you just being polite?”

Yamaguchi’s eyebrows pinch his forehead. He doesn’t say anything. Kei considers using one of his chopsticks to stab himself in the hand.

“Just wondering,” he finishes, like that’s supposed to lessen the blow, instead of doubling its damage output.

“Um.” Yamaguchi lets out a stiff, empty laugh, eyes drifting to the window. “Never mind.”

Kei means to say _okay_ , but what stumbles out instead is, “Where, uh, are you… from.”

Yamaguchi’s eyes come back, a little wider for a moment. A waitress walks by, laughing to herself about a joke Kei hadn’t heard. Yamaguchi smiles unsurely, and Kei stuffs down the blind instinct to smile back.

“Around Miyagi originally,” he says. “But I’ve lived in Tokyo since I started university.”

 _Cool_ , Kei means to say this time, and leave it at that, but once again there is a wiring error. “What did you… study.”

“Business,” Yamaguchi answers. “It was boring, but, you know, practical! What about you?”

“Accounting.”

“Eh?!” Yamaguchi lets loose a disbelieving laugh before clapping a hand over his mouth. “Sorry, uh, it’s just… you don’t seem like the salaryman type.”

Kei scowls at him. “Neither do you.”

“I guess that’s fair,” Yamaguchi says. “Well, um…” He seems to be gearing himself up for something, tension pulling at his shoulders. Then he blurts out, “I’m glad you ended up at TV Asahi!”

It’s pretty loud, all things considered. The dining room briefly quiets to accommodate it.

Kei scoffs when the ambient chatter resumes. “That makes one of us.”

“Do you really hate it that much?” Yamaguchi looks hurt, almost, as if Kei’s opinion of his job has anything at all to do with him.

Kei hums noncommittally. “I wouldn’t say I _hate_ it.”

“No?” Yamaguchi says hopefully.

“No. That requires too much energy.”

“Ah.” There’s that half-formed laugh again. It curdles something in Kei’s stomach. “Funny.”

He does not sound like he thinks so.

Kei is stricken with, of all things, the urge to _apologize_ —but thankfully a commotion starts up behind him before he can act on it.

“Yamaguchi! Stingyshima!” Hinata’s voice jars the whole dining area.

Kei’s face sours and he twists around in his chair to glare up at Hinata, who has taken up residence directly behind his chair. There are some flakes of snow dotting his hair and his nose is very obviously running. Kageyama is hunched a step or two behind him, looking utterly miserable for a guy who just went out on a date. His nose is bright red, and he keeps sniffling.

“Oi,” Hinata says to Yamaguchi, spectacularly ignoring Kei’s disgruntled expression. He jabs his thumb over his shoulder. “We’d better get going if we don’t want to get snowed in.”

“‘Snowed in?’” Kei repeats. “Snowed in from _what_? The blizzard is going to—”

“Blow over to Fukushima and Tochigi,” Yamaguchi finishes for him, and when Kei whips his head around, he glances swiftly at the ceiling.

“You were actually listening to him, Yamaguchi?” Hinata asks, bewildered. “I haven’t done that in _forever_.”

“I’ll just, um, go pay the bill,” Yamaguchi sputters, springing up from his chair so swiftly that it makes a loud scraping sound on the floor. He grabs the tray from the corner of the table and scurries off to find the counter, leaving Kei temporarily with a pair of shivering morons and a profound sense of confusion.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He forgets until they’re all piled into the van that it will be Hinata’s responsibility to drive them back. Even presuming that he will manage it with all of their limbs kept intact is far too optimistic. Kei takes the passenger seat again, if only because his arms are probably the longest and thus have the best chance of grabbing the steering wheel should disaster strike. Kageyama and Yamaguchi clamber into the back, Yamaguchi behind Hinata’s seat and Kageyama behind Kei’s.

“So did you survive?” Hinata asks Yamaguchi in the rear view mirror as he buckles his seatbelt (since Yamaguchi reminded him to after he’d started the engine). “Tsukishima didn’t eat you alive?”

“He’s still here, isn’t he?” Kei deadpans.

“We had a very pleasant conversation,” Yamaguchi replies.

“With Tsukishima?” Kageyama mutters to himself, scratching his head in some pitiful imitation of thought. “‘Pleasant?’ ‘ _Conversation_?”

“Well, it’s like the proverb says.” Hinata lifts a finger to affect an air of wisdom. “‘Even oni can be moved to an iron club.’”

“That’s,” Kei says, “very incorrect.”

“Anyway,” Hinata plows on, “ready to head back?”

Kei has been ready to head back since they’d all been standing in the studio parking lot in Roppongi, but he doesn’t say that.

By the time they make it to the freeway, Hinata has blasted through two red lights and a stop sign, turned into the wrong traffic lane, and forced them all to listen to a Perfume CD. Kei wonders if this sequence of events could be classifiable as a form of torture. He is able to keep calm by losing himself in a vivid and exhaustively detailed fantasy of Hinata going to prison for the rest of his life.

The snowfall thickens the farther from Karuizawa they get, for some reason. In fact, when they’re coming up on one of the tunnels, it’s done it so much that the visibility is probably ten feet at best. Up ahead, Kei sees a line of illuminated brake lights—the traffic is stopped completely dead.

“What the hell is this?” he mutters.

“Hm, I don’t know, Tsukishima,” Hinata says, arching his eyebrows. “Could it be that ginormous blizzard we’re _not_ supposed to get? Nah! No way!”

Bearing witness to Hinata’s shoddy attempt at sarcasm would ordinarily give Kei ample reason to jump out of a moving vehicle, but today, he just can’t muster the energy. He lets his head drop against the passenger side window.

It rests there for only a fleeting instant before Hinata brakes too hard, sending everyone jerking forward.

“Who the hell gave you a license, dumbass?” Kageyama kicks his seat. “Were they asleep?”

“Look who’s talking! Have you ever even made it out of the parking lot before they failed you?”

“Shut up!”

“Here’s an interesting idea,” Kei says acidly. “ _Both_ of you shut up, indefinitely.”

“Now, now,” Yamaguchi says. Kei jumps—Yamaguchi’s face is right next to his. He’s clambered up from the back seat to see better. His freckles are… numerous. “It looks like it’s stopped dead. Should we ask somebody?”

“Oi, Kageyama, quit fidgeting! We’ve been stopped for, like, _two_ seconds!”

“I have to take a piss,” Kageyama mumbles.

“Say ‘pee!’” Hinata wails with a disgusted look. “ _Pee_ , Kageyama! You’re so vulgar!”

“Piss.”

“Pee!”

“ _Piss_!”

“Pee!”

“Well, if Kageyama has to pee, we’re not just going to sit here,” Yamaguchi declares, just when Kei has begun to foolishly hope that they’ve all maybe gotten past the point of belaboring the proper vocabulary for Kageyama’s bodily functions. “I’ll go.”

He clenches a determined fist in front of him, eyes blazing, as if he is about to charge into the underworld and not walk twenty steps in the snow to ask a highway patrolman to explain traffic. In a way, it’s kind of cute—or would be if Kei believed in those kinds of things, which he doesn’t.

“Yamaguchi, fight-o!” Hinata cheers as Yamaguchi opens the door. They give each other a thumbs up in the passenger side mirror.

Kei watches Yamaguchi trudge ahead and cram his hands into his armpits against the gale when it rushes through, blowing flurries of snow across the road. Sure enough, there is a highway patrolman directing traffic up ahead. Both his figure and Yamaguchi’s become harder to distinguish as the wind picks up, but Kei can make out Yamaguchi talking to him, gesturing to the van, then to the blocked tunnel. He’s hunched over from the cold.

“Producer-sama is so brave.” Hinata sighs.

“Why don’t you marry him, then, dumbass,” Kageyama grumbles.

Kei smirks. So _obvious_.

“For your information, Stupid Kageyama, I think marrying Yamaguchi-san would be _awesome_ ,” Hinata retorts, glaring at Kageyama in the rear view mirror, which is somehow even _more_ obvious than Kageyama’s hapless attempt at indifference. “He’s nice and dependable and he says ‘pee,’ because he’s polite.”

“I can be dependable,” Kageyama mutters petulantly, crossing his arms and scowling at the disordered cables on the floor.

Hinata’s face softens, unseen by Kageyama. He settles back down into the driver’s seat, fingers tapping an erratic beat on the steering wheel.

His lower lip juts out. “I’ll bet even Tsukishima likes Yamaguchi.”

“Do you know that when you speak it just sounds like crow noises?” Kei asks.

Hinata makes a rude gesture at him. Kei makes one back.

“He’s coming back,” Kageyama says, pointing at the windshield.

Kei glances up uninterestedly. Yamaguchi finishes bowing to the patrolman and makes his way back toward them, his head ducked against the wind. It disguises any expression Kei might be able to read to infer their prospects.

When he hops back into the van, he slams the door behind him to keep out the cold, but some of it still surges aggressively in, making Kei flinch, Hinata shiver, and Kageyama sneeze.

“S-Sorry,” Yamaguchi says through chattering teeth.

“Well?” Kei prompts him, twisting around.

Hinata hits him in the arm. “How about a ‘thank you for doing that, Producer-sama? It was very considerate, Producer-sama?’”

“What did he say?” Kageyama asks Yamaguchi.

Yamaguchi rubs his hands together rapidly. His fingertips are bright red. His fingernails are trimmed down neatly. Why is Kei staring at his hands.

“Yamaguchi-san?” Hinata prods him when he doesn’t reply, sounding concerned.

“He said we could either go back to Karuizawa,” Yamaguchi says glumly, “or freeze to death.”

Hinata and Kageyama turn in unison to stare expectantly at Kei, who has only just now managed to stop staring at Yamaguchi’s hands. He glares back at them, but neither budges. Apparently this decision will fall to him.

He leans back in his seat, weighing the options.

“I’m thinking,” he says.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They go back to Karuizawa. The innkeeper simply allows them to take back their old rooms, without much fuss or fanfare other than an entirely uncalled-for chuckle at their predicament. Kei strides back to his own with his bag in tow and immediately whips out his phone.

“Ennoshita-san.”

“Oh, Tsukishima! Afternoon. Great footage you all sent in today; tell Yamaguchi well done. Did you decide to let Kinoshita take the five-o’clock after all?”

“Ennoshita-san,” Kei repeats, bracing his hand against the wall for support, “we’re trapped.”

“What? Trapped?”

“There’s—” Kei drops his head onto the wall, too. “There’s a blizzard.”

A pause, then: “Ha. Well, go figure.”

“‘Go figure?’ Is that all you have to say? This isn’t a _joke_. You have to find a way to get us out of here.”

“Out of Karuizawa? There are worse places to be snowed in, you know.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“Oh, come on. What’s so bad about getting a little surprise vacation in the mountains? You worked really hard last year; I don’t think you even _took_ a vacation. Listen, why don’t I just give you the next two days off so you can enjoy yourse—”

“With all respect, Ennoshita-san, I would rather die.”

“Tsukishima, whose fault is it that you never learned how to have fun? I’d like to have a word with them.”

“Aren’t there resources we have? Failsafes? For emergencies or celebrities or something? I’m both. I’m a celebrity in an emergency.”

“Oh, is that so? Don’t be so dramatic. You’ll live. Go get some drinks with Yamaguchi. I really do think you two would—”

“Don’t bother attending my wake, Ennoshita-san,” Kei snaps into the receiver, and hangs up.

He paces the room, frantically rifling through his brain for a solution to the horror novel his life has now become. Another day in Karuizawa? Another day in Karuizawa with _Hinata and Kageyama_? What if the storm doesn’t pass? What if he’s imprisoned here for _weeks_? What if he _dies_ here?

He shakes his head. No. There’s no way. The storm will clear up tomorrow, they’ll all wake up early, and Hinata will drive (“drive”) them home. And then he will give his notice, and move on to a different station or a different department or _something_ , and he will never, ever have to return to Karuizawa for as long as he lives.

Right. _Right_.

He puts on his pajamas. He rolls out the futon and lies down on it, staring at the ceiling. And then, mentally repeating each step of this logical plan of escape to himself, he goes to sleep.

Tomorrow will be _fine_.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“ _Stay with me… I knock on the door at midnight—I cried without going home—that season is now right in front of you—stay with me_ …”

“Good morning, Karuizawa! Don’t rush to get out of bed, now, because it’s _cold_ out there this morning—”

“It’s cold out there every morning!”

Kei pokes his head out from where he had burrowed it under the quilt, squinting at the formless blur that is the opposite wall.

Matsubara Miki _again_.

He sits up, scrubbing at his face with one hand. Yesterday’s tape? Really? How professional. Truly, Karuizawa’s local radio is on the cutting edge of modern reporting. Ah, and the hotel staff still hasn’t fixed his heater. They’re _really_ lucky he didn’t freeze to death.

“Today is February 3rd, and you know what that means—it’s Risshun, the spring Setsubun! Preparations are already underway for the oni purification rite at Kumanokotai Shrine this morning at nine o’clock sharp; be sure not to miss it!”

“I can’t believe it’s that time again; can you?”

“I sure can’t!”

“So exciting! Reprising their roles as oni this year are Nishinoya Yuu and Tanaka Ryuunosuke, who…”

Kei slowly, slowly lowers his hand from his face.

He slowly, slowly turns to stare at the radio.

He slowly, slowly reaches for his glasses. He slowly, slowly puts them on.

No. There’s no reason to be unsettled. Of course they’re playing yesterday’s tape by mistake. What is he getting all worked up about? It’s not February 3rd; it’s February 4th. It’s February 4th and it’s not snowing outside anymore—it looks remarkably clear, in fact—and he’s going home, back to his tiny apartment in Shinagawa, back to his sweeping view of the high-rise next door and back to his short remaining tenure as a TV Asahi weatherman.

He switches the radio off a little too fast.

There’s no point in hurrying to get dressed; it’s not as though they’re on a deadline to flee Karuizawa, although they would be if Kei had anything to say about it. He shuffles into the bathroom to wash his face, trying valiantly to ignore his phone as it buzzes periodically from the floor. Probably Hinata, sending him _memes_.

On the ninth buzz, Kei huffs, drops the towel from his still-wet face, and drapes it around his neck. He stomps back to the futon and squats down to take his phone in his hand.

_from: Yamaguchi Tadashi_

_where are you? we need to leave soon_

_from: Yamaguchi Tadashi_

_well just make sure to meet us at the shrine by 9_

_from: Yamaguchi Tadashi_

_it’s almost 9… are you on your way?_

_from: Yamaguchi Tadashi_

_can you call me please?_

_[5 Missed Calls from Yamaguchi Tadashi]_

The _shrine_? What the hell _for_? Hadn’t they seen enough of that place yesterday? Well, whatever. Yamaguchi probably got sick of waiting for him to come down and decided to use the opportunity to get some extra footage. Tranquil snow-laden mountains to dazzle the soulless urbanites, or some such nonsense.

To the shrine it is, then. Getting yelled at by Yamaguchi is definitely not on his list of preferred activities for today. (What would that even be like? _Can_ Yamaguchi yell?)

The chalkboard outside the dining room is advertising the same daily special as yesterday. Kei snorts when he passes it. As he’s about to exit the lobby, his phone buzzes again in his pocket.

_from: Yamaguchi Tadashi_

_the oni dance just ended! (`A´) i’m going to tell ennoshita-san on you!_

“Will you all be checking out today as planned, Tsukishima-sama?” the old man behind the reception counter jovially asks from over Kei’s shoulder.

Kei stares at his screen. He lifts his chin, stares at the door. Then he half-turns back and stares at the old man, whose smile suddenly looks more devilish than affable.

He’s wearing the same red tracksuit that he was yesterday.

“Chance of departure,” Kei answers faintly, “80%?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Kei considers himself a reasonably intelligent person. He has never had much trouble picking up on things and takes some pride in his tendency to remain rational under even the most extenuating of circumstances. That said, it is difficult to apply that intelligence or rationalism when faced with information so far-fetched, so unthinkable, as to defy all laws of reality as he knows it. In this case, that information is as follows: it seems that he is living through February 3rd a second time.

“Excuse me,” he rigidly asks a young woman with short brown hair and a black bomber jacket when she passes him in the shopping district, “where’s everyone going?”

She gives him a bewildered smile, stepping out of the way of the milling pedestrians making their way up the road.

“Kumanokotai Shrine,” she answers over her shoulder. “It’s Risshun!”

“It’s still just once a year, isn’t it?” Kei calls after her, but she’s already out of earshot.

With no better alternative, Kei keeps walking—the same route he’d taken yesterday, past the same stores. It’s absolutely freezing. That’s why his teeth are chattering, definitely. He whips out his phone to scroll through Yamaguchi’s messages again.

“Oi, you! Glasses! Tsukishima Kei-kun!”

Kei reels around so fast he nearly breaks his neck slipping on a patch of ice. Standing on the pavement behind him in that black coat and that red scarf is—

“Yo,” Kuroo says dryly. “Jeez, _you’re_ a hard guy to flag down. I’ve been calling you for two blocks. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were repulsed by human contact.”

“What,” Kei says.

“Ah, you don’t remember me, do you? I’m—”

“Kuroo-san,” Kei croaks.

“Wow! That’s impressive.” In spite of the words, Kuroo is still giving him a wry grin, like he’s in on some absolutely hilarious joke of which Kei is unaware. “As expected of a brainiac, I guess.”

“Didn’t,” Kei says, and swallows, “we do this yesterday?”

Kuroo’s expression is unperturbed. “What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

Kuroo shrugs one shoulder. “Where are you heading?”

“Somewhere else,” Kei says stiffly, and strides away without further explanation.

“Ah, going to film at the shrine?” Kuroo asks, completely undaunted, jogging to keep walking beside him. “I guess you guys at TV Asahi did always prefer the simple approach.”

“Now is really not the best time, Kuroo-san—”

“It’s funny that I should run into you, actually,” Kuroo continues. “I’m here on assignment with Kenma—you remember Kenma—but also to check up on our old director. He owns the inn back on the hill and he mentioned that you—”

“Good-bye,” Kei says curtly, ducking under Kuroo’s languidly gesturing arm to cut across the street.

 _Splash_.

“Ooh,” Kuroo says behind him. “That was a pretty cool exit, Tsukishima! See you around!”

Kei counts down from ten. He sucks in a breath and holds it. He bows his head and focuses on his shoes.

He takes one step forward out of the slush puddle. He takes a second. Then a third, a fourth. And then he breaks into a run.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s all the same.

The weather is the same. The smell is the same. The pinch of cold on his face is the same. The chanting voices of the priests are the same. Hinata’s squatting pose on the tree stump is the same—the tree stump is the same. Kageyama’s unsightly neon blue jacket is the same.

Yamaguchi’s dinosaur-print shirt, just visible at the collar under his coat, is the same. The indignant look on his face is not.

“Where have you been?” he demands, accusing. He’s standing opposite Kei with his hands gripped into fists at his sides, his glare harsh and reproachful. “We’ve been texting you! They’re about to start!”

“Yamaguchi,” Kei says to him in a daze, “I need someone to slap me in the face. Right now.”

Yamaguchi blinks rapidly at him for only a second. Then he chews his lip, releases it again, winds his arm back, and slaps Kei in the face.

 _Very_ hard.

Kei stumbles to the side, cheek burning. He’s still in the shrine courtyard, and Kageyama’s jacket is still ugly, and Yamaguchi is still standing in front of him, looking more distressed by the second.

“Thank you,” Kei deadpans.

“If you need someone to get the other side, just ask,” Kageyama says.

“Seriously, what’s going on with you?” Yamaguchi asks, edging closer to Kei. His face darkens. “If you’re just trying to get out of work today—”

“No, it’s—I…” Kei flounders, staring blankly at the shoulder of Yamaguchi’s coat. “I don’t feel so good.”

At once, the anger on Yamaguchi’s face unravels. Were Kei not presently in a state of grave shock, he might find it sweet.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. He lifts his hand near Kei’s arm, halts, and pulls it back again. When Kei doesn’t answer, _can’t_ answer, his voice softens. “Listen… let’s just get through this, okay, and then we can talk. Will you be okay?”

Kei is not certain he will be okay. Kei is not certain he has ever, in his life, been okay. But he wants to be, for the sake of that imploring look Yamaguchi is giving him, so he nods mutely and opens his hand for the mic.

Kageyama says, “The green one just did a somersault.”

“Are you serious?!” Hinata squawks. “That’s so _cool_!”

“Okay, enough joking around,” Yamaguchi says to them sternly. “Hinata, Kageyama; get over to the camera. Tsukishima…” The way he handles Kei’s name is cautious, gentle. “You ready?”

Kei stares blankly at the microphone in his hand. He practices the motions of a nod.

“If that’s the only word I have to choose from,” he hears himself rasp.

The rite passes in a shapeless blur, as though separated from Kei by a pane of frosted glass. The crowd’s reactions are muffled and half-real. He finds his eyes wandering to the back of Yamaguchi’s neck, only a couple of feet in front of him, a sliver of skin visible between the ends of his hair and his orange wool scarf. He has goosebumps. He’s laughing.

“Tsukishima.” Kageyama’s voice drifts errantly through the din. “Oi, _Tsu-ki-shi-ma_.”

Tsukishima looks over, dazed, to find the camera pointed at him, waiting. Hinata is gesticulating frantically for him to talk.

He opens his mouth.

“Tsukishima Kei… in Karuizawa. Well, it’s Risshun. Again. Uh, I’m here at the… the shrine, the local shrine, waiting for the oni to appear and, uh, be driven back… by the beans… well, I guess they already have—it was… good. Very exciting. It’s over. Done. Happy New Year? Good-bye.”

“Well,” Hinata says cheerfully when Kageyama stops recording, “that was definitely the worst thing I’ve ever seen! Nice, Tsukishima!”

Yamaguchi approaches Kei and, before he can react, pulls off one of his mittens to set his warm hand on Kei’s forehead.

“You don’t have a fever, at least,” he mutters. His fingertips graze the ends of Kei’s hair, and he brushes some of it aside, just for an instant, probably unconsciously. His face is close, _too close_ ; Kei stares stupidly into his eyes. “Did you not sleep well, or what?”

Hinata lets out a theatrical gasp. “Were you up all night _partying_?”

“I just,” Kei says roughly, and gulps, hard, as if that will return some semblance of confidence to his voice. Yamaguchi’s hand lingers, warm. “I just… I think I want to go home.”

Hinata rolls his eyes. “The schedule doesn’t bend to your will, Tsukishima—”

“He’s sick,” Kageyama grunts, elbowing him in the shoulder. “Go easy on him.”

Hinata looks—well, not apologetic, exactly, but maybe a vague shade of worried, if Kei pays enough attention, which, in his current state, is a pretty tall order. Mostly, though, he looks jealous of Kageyama’s suggestion to _go easy_ on Kei, as Kageyama has never, in all his years of employment, told anyone to go easy on Hinata.

“Let’s get some food first,” Yamaguchi suggests, lowering his hand and tugging the mitten back on. “Maybe that’ll make you feel better. I was just going to eat an early lunch at the inn…”

“Want to try that restaurant we saw last night, Kageyama?” Hinata asks excitedly as he loops the cord to the portable battery around his arm.

Kageyama nods eagerly.

“I’ll take care of Tsukishima,” Yamaguchi says, as if this type of declaration is _natural_. “So then, we can all reconvene in the lobby at… one? Kageyama, why don’t you and Hinata take the van since you have the camera?”

“Roger! Oi, Kageyama, hurry up; I’m starving—”

“So what else is new?”

“Look who’s talking!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?! Dumbass! Slow down, damn it; you’ll drop the…”

“Tsukishima?”

There’s Yamaguchi’s face, angled up at him, all worry and hesitation. He doesn’t look away. Kei swallows and says nothing. Yamaguchi’s arm twitches, and were Kei more possessed of his wits he might think it was a motion to reach for his hand.

“Come on,” he says softly, and Kei, for sore lack of a sensible alternative, does as he’s told.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“This is the best miso soup I’ve ever had,” Yamaguchi exclaims, eyes aglimmer.

Kei is giving the corner of the table what is no doubt a thousand-yard stare. Yamaguchi doesn’t seem to have noticed, or if he has, his interest has been stolen by the flavor of the hotel dining room’s miso soup, which he is fulsomely reacting to as though he is tasting it for the very first time.

The light filtering through the windows is the same, faint and pale. The patrons inside are the same, and they’re at the same tables. Yamaguchi had taken the same seat. He had ordered the same thing.

“You have to try some, Tsukishima!” Yamaguchi exclaims, sounding, in Kei’s estimation, several universes away. “It’s so _good_.”

He sounds like he’s about to start crying.

Again.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei says hoarsely, “do you ever have déjà vu?”

Yamaguchi lowers his bowl and blinks, one cheek bulging.

“Mm,” he replies, then swallows. “I don’t think so.” He leans forward. “What’s going on, anyway? Are you sick?”

The concern in his voice is completely genuine. It boggles Kei’s mind.

“Maybe,” Kei says. Devoid of any appetite, he slides his food to Yamaguchi, miso soup and all. “You can have this.”

Yamaguchi beams. “Really?!”

That enthusiasm had been kind of endearing the first time, but now it makes Kei feel sick to his stomach.

He just kind of sits there in a haze until Yamaguchi finishes eating. He gets a better look at the courtyard this time. There’s a stone fountain, though it isn’t running, and a little artificial stream with a shishi-odoshi bobbing stalwartly away. The bushes that aren’t bare are a deep, stark green against the leftover snow, and some of the stones in the pathway are visible, too, through trailing footprints.

“Um, hey, listen,” Yamaguchi says. Kei turns his head back at the sound of a bowl clicking down on the table. Yamaguchi is chewing his lip. “I’m sorry for being short with you earlier. I didn’t mean to act like you were slacking off or anything; I just—”

This, too, is familiar. Part of it, anyway. Kei had cut him off yesterday, having had no interest in making a whole soul-baring talk out of it, but now, confused and a little queasy, he can’t remember how he managed it. He watches as Yamaguchi stops himself and chews his lip a little harder, as if trying to knead an answer out of it.

“I just think that if you, um, put in some effort,” he says at last, “you’d be really, really good. I-I mean, even better than you already are.”

Kei opens his mouth before he’s even considered speaking. It remains open for a second. Yamaguchi still isn’t looking at him; his face has fractionally contorted into a wince, like he’s bracing for impact.

“It’s fine,” Kei murmurs.

The tension in Yamaguchi’s shoulders slackens a bit, but the tilt of his mouth is disappointed. “Okay.”

There is that familiar feeling again: that there is something more Kei is supposed to say, and that if he says it, it will change something, _everything_.

But then a commotion starts up behind him, and he supposes that’s the end of that.

“Yamaguchi!” Hinata’s voice calls. “Stingyshima!”

“Oh, Hinata,” Yamaguchi answers, sitting up straighter.

Kei doesn’t even move, doesn’t even turn to see if Kageyama’s there, too. He already knows.

“Oi,” Hinata says, stopping beside Kei’s chair, “we’d better get going if we don’t want to get snowed in.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“You can’t be serious.”

“Ennoshita-san,” Kei says into the receiver as calmly as he can, “have you ever known me to be the sort of person who makes jokes?”

There’s a thoughtful silence on the other end before Ennoshita concedes, “No.”

Kei is cross-legged on the floor of his hotel room, facing the sliding glass door to the balcony. It’s already dark outside, even though it’s only 5:30, and the storm that had obstructed them on the highway has ebbed into nothing more than flurries, though it’s left Karuizawa blanketed in snow.

“You have to find a way to get me out of here,” Kei says. “Or it will happen again.”

“It being…” Ennoshita says slowly.

“ _Don’t_ make me say it again.”

“Look, Tsukishima,” Ennoshita tells him. “I’m sorry that you’re stuck in Karuizawa another day, but it’s not the apocalypse we’re talking about here. Why don’t we discuss this in the morning?”

“I don’t _want_ to discuss it in the morning.”

“And I _want_ to go home,” Ennoshita says. “As in, not work. As in, I was supposed to have caught my train half an hour ago, but one of my ungrateful coworkers called me to try to, what, prank me? I _think_ that’s what’s happening here? Let me just say, Tsukishima—you are not very good at it. We’ll sort this out tomorrow.”

“What if there _is_ no tomorrow?!” Kei demands, pulling his phone from his ear so he can yell at it better. “There wasn’t one today!”

“Very funny,” Ennoshita says. “Why don’t you go get drinks with Yamaguchi or something? I really think you two would—”

Kei glares thunderously at the screen and crushes the red _end call_ button with his thumb.

He stands up, starts pacing. Maybe this is just a fluke of some sort. A very long and complicated fever dream. If it isn’t—he swallows—if it _isn’t_ , he’ll have to figure out how it works.

First, sleeping is out of the question. If the day doesn’t revert when he sleeps, then that means there’s a set time, and if he can narrow down when that is, he’ll have a better chance of assessing the variables that cause the change to occur. Second, there’s got to be some way he can track it. The likelihood that taking notes or leaving clues would work is slim; everything would just be reset, after all. He’d have to rely on his own memory, which seems to be the only thing unaltered by the change, so that’s one thing in his favor.

He stops pacing and scans the room, alighting on a pencil laid neatly next to the hotel’s complimentary stationery on the corner table. He strides over, picks it up, and breaks it in half. He takes the two splintered pieces over to the futon and sets them on the floor beside the pillow. He pulls the alarm clock from the shelf and brings it as close to the futon as the cord will allow, arranging it next to the pencil.

Trying to do anything frivolous to pass the time will be useless, so he puts on his pajamas and lies down on his stomach on top of the comforter, propping himself up on his elbows to watch the minutes trundle by.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“ _Stay with me… I knock on the door at midnight—I cried without going home—_ ”

Kei doesn’t even change out of his pajamas. He doesn’t even turn the alarm off. He throws off the comforter ( _when had he ended up under it?_ ) and sprints barefoot for the door, scrambling down the hallway into the dining room.

“Hah?!” Hinata squawks, choking on his mackerel when he sees him. “Tsukishima’s sleepwalking!”

“I need to talk to you,” Kei says to Yamaguchi, who’s gaping up at him with his chopsticks halfway to his mouth. A slice of daikon drops from them onto his plate. “ _Right now_.”

Bizarrely, it does not take much more convincing than that to get him to abandon his breakfast and follow Kei, although Hinata vocally tries to dissuade him. Kei grabs Yamaguchi by the wrist and drags him into the hallway that connects the dining room to the kitchen.

He’s scarcely finished turning to face him, back pressed to the wall, before Yamaguchi hisses, “What are you _doing_?”

“What day is it today?” Kei demands. He must look completely nuts. His bare feet are freezing, and he can tell that his hair is sticking up, and there’s some dried drool on his chin.

“F-February third,” Yamaguchi answers with some hesitation. “It’s Risshun; why—”

“When did we get here?” Kei asks. A waiter emerges from behind the curtain and slips past them; Yamaguchi flattens himself against the wall to let him by.

“Yesterday,” Yamaguchi says. His face clouds with worry. “Do you not remember?”

“I do remember,” Kei says. “This is the third time.”

Yamaguchi says, “Huh?”

Kei scrubs a hand over his face. Only then does he realize that he hadn’t put on his glasses. No wonder Yamaguchi looks like a nondescript blob.

“I thought this was your fourth year doing Karuizawa.” Yamaguchi tilts his head. Even for a blob, it’s kind of a cute mannerism, which Kei definitely would not have acknowledged if he weren’t currently two steps short of catatonic.

“How long have you known me?” Kei demands.

“I… a day? We—”

“Yamaguchi,” Kei says, and Yamaguchi instantly stops talking. “Listen to me. This is the third time I’m living through this day.”

“ _Huh_?” Yamaguchi repeats, louder this time.

“Watch,” Kei says. He crosses his arms, leaning closer, trying not to be distracted when it brings Yamaguchi’s face into clearer focus. “How did you sleep last night?”

“I… um… fine, I guess?” Yamaguchi isn’t leaning away. He seems to be placing a lot of focus on Kei’s… chin? It’s hard to tell. “Although I think they forgot to put a kotatsu in my room—”

“See?” Kei points emphatically at him. “I knew that. I knew you were going to say that.”

Yamaguchi opens his mouth again, flounders, and then shakes his head quickly as if trying to wake up.

“Look, I, uh… I _want_ to believe you,” he finally says, and that is when Kei learns that Yamaguchi is not a very good liar, “but there’s no way you can, um… you know. _Prove_ that?”

Kei’s hand drops limply to his side.

Yamaguchi doesn’t believe him.

Well, there’s nothing surprising about that, is there— _Kei_ certainly wouldn’t believe it, were their roles reversed. What had he expected? For Yamaguchi to grasp both of his shoulders with a heroic look on his face and say, _I’ll save you_? For him to promise that they’d figure it out, together, as though they were old and loyal friends?

Yamaguchi has known him for a day. Yamaguchi will have always known him for a day.

“There’s going to be a blizzard,” Kei tells him softly. The voice is hardly his own.

“A blizzard?” Yamaguchi repeats. “What, today? But you said the storm was going to blow over Saitama and Nagano and go to—”

“I changed my mind,” Kei tries.

Yamaguchi sighs, clearly beginning to lose patience. “You’re not just trying to get out of working, are you?”

“No—”

“Look, I know you don’t like it here,” Yamaguchi says, “and I’m sorry about that, I _am_ , but—doing this broadcast is really important to a lot of people, and… and it’s your job, and you’re good at it—”

“Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to like it,” Kei snaps.

Yamaguchi’s face seizes up. “Who doesn’t like being good at something?!”

Kei flinches back, dumbfounded. Yamaguchi swiftly ducks his head, his right hand gripping the leg of his pants, his eyes shadowed in the dimness.

“I don’t really understand that about you,” he says to the floor, strained. “But I guess it doesn’t matter.” He draws in a slow breath and lets it out again, and the tension in the air evaporates with it. “Let’s just get through today, okay? If you’re really not feeling well, I can take you to a doctor in Tokyo—”

“I’m not _going_ back to Tokyo,” Kei insists as clearly and as convincingly as he can.

“Why?”

“The storm.”

“The storm,” Yamaguchi repeats. “The storm, huh…”

“Yes,” Kei says.

Yamaguchi lifts his head at last and holds Kei’s stare without blinking. His eyes shift faintly over Kei’s face, as if searching for something. The waiter that had passed them earlier comes back through to the kitchen; this time, Yamaguchi doesn’t try to get out of his way.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei murmurs, “I’m serious.”

Yamaguchi’s disbelief, for just a second, wavers. But something stops him—something that he sees in Kei’s face, something that Kei isn’t even aware is there.

Finally, he says, “Me too, Tsukishima. Sorry. Be at the shrine at nine like we planned.”

Kei sees no point in saying anything after that. He stares blankly at the empty space that Yamaguchi leaves behind, breathing harder than he needs to, with a pain in his chest that doesn’t lessen, as though he’s run too fast, too far.

He considers going to the shrine. He considers doing the broadcast a third time, if only for Yamaguchi’s sake—for this Yamaguchi’s sake.

But there will be another broadcast, another Yamaguchi, another storm. And Kei has always been a bit of a selfish person. When he returns to his room, he finds the pencil back on the table he had taken it from, unbroken.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Once the shock of it wears away, Kei comes to learn that living in a time loop has its advantages. Consequences become an irrelevant concept; regret even moreso. He can read as much as he wants, and no one will bother him. He can skip the Risshun reporting as many times as he feels like, and he won’t get fired. He can get drunk and not have a hangover. He can leave a restaurant without paying for his meal. He can sleep in until noon.

He learns more about Karuizawa than he’d have ever cared to, from where to get the best strawberry shortcake to which secluded corner of the public library has the strongest heating. He develops a constant, steady awareness of all of its moving parts: the school gym where the youth volleyball team practices until after four, the restaurant where a boisterous throng celebrates Risshun with hot ginger sake after dark, the crowded bookstore, the shy couples in the dessert café, the twinkling lights left over from Christmas, the park where kids have snowball fights. Faces become familiar to him whether he wants them to or not. He even starts learning people’s _names_.

He puts a fairly inspiring amount of effort into leaning into it, in his opinion. While most would no doubt plummet into depression and nihilism right off the bat, Kei is made of sterner stuff than that. He had survived working with Bokuto and he has survived numerous years of commuting on the same train as Hinata and Kageyama—he can endure near anything, by this point. He’s resilient by nature. A tendency toward ennui helps a lot with that.  

But then, gradually, he stops keeping count of the days. It doesn’t even happen consciously—the same as he wouldn’t count snowflakes in a storm, the same as he wouldn’t count leaves on trees. Once distinct experiences, they begin to feel as though they are separated by less and less. Though he wakes up with a physically well-rested body, he realizes that he can’t recall what it feels like to sleep or dream.  

He wants to see a blue sky again. He wants to go out for monjayaki at midnight. He wants to watch bad dramas while the space heater in his apartment runs on full blast. He wants to see the sun glinting off the silver skyscrapers of Tokyo from his morning train. He wants to remember what it’s like not to be _cold_ ; a stiff, unbreakable, everlasting cold.

Once he stops bothering with the broadcast, he encounters Hinata and Kageyama only occasionally, either by design or circumstance. Yamaguchi, however, continuously finds ways to track him down wherever he might have wandered, showing up on street corners and in restaurants and wherever else to give him an injured look, to talk about being better, as though that’s something Kei can just _do_ , as though it’s as simple as opening an unlocked door.

That’s all it takes to knock his so-called resilience into rubble, when it comes down to it. A look, one too many times.

“You call that a block?” he drawls through one cupped hand, the other holding a bottle of convenience store sake. “An elephant could fit through that! Are you trying to stop the ball or high-five the spiker?!”

“Tsukishima?” Yamaguchi exclaims from the gymnasium doorway, and when Kei looks over, he sees him standing there with one mitten on the jamb, wearing his huge coat and his huge scarf and _that look_. “I’ve been looking all over for you—we started an _hour_ ago—I could hear you all the way out on the _street_ —” He blinks, hard, doing an appalled double-take. “Is that a _bathrobe_?”

“Oh,” Kei says, very drunk, lifting the sake in a toast. “Yes. It is.”

Yamaguchi gawks at him with a wrinkled brow, craning his neck further into the gym to see the high school volleyball team playing a practice match.

“Want some?” Kei calls, stifling a formless laugh.

Yamaguchi’s disgusted face in the plain light of the open gymnasium cuts his hollow amusement in two. He looks as though he’s breathing harder, gripping the door jamb tighter. Kei briefly wonders if he’s about to cross the room and hit him. The thought makes him feel more awake than he has in months.

“I can see you’re busy,” Yamaguchi says, chilled and slow. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Kei hollers after him, affecting the usual indifference, but there’s an ache coiled at his temple and a bitter taste between his teeth. A sudden comprehension begins to push through the stupor: that every day, without variance or fluctuation, no matter where he goes, Yamaguchi always comes to look for him. _Always_.

And what a stupid joke _that_ is, Kei thinks on the dark, cold walk back to the inn that night, tilting his sore neck back to search the cloudy sky for the dull and shapeless glow of the half-moon beyond the clouds. Looking for _him_ , of all people. Just to give him that damn look.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Oya oya? What’s this, what’s this?”

“Hello, Kuroo-san,” Kei says, settling onto a barstool.

At 9 PM, Hinata can always be found at this trendy bar in Kyu-Karuizawa with about half a glass of beer. He’s usually there either with Kageyama or alone and crying about Kageyama. Kei has stopped trying to keep track of what causes which. Kuroo is usually there, too, several seats down, with Kenma on the other side of him, bowed over the turquoise glow of his phone.  

It’s nice enough—dim, warm lighting; a row of booths with red leather seats against the right wall, a long mahogany bar to the left. It looks like the kind of place that would normally be crowded, but most people have gone to the local party at the izakaya down the street, so Hinata, Kuroo, Kenma, and Kei are the only ones there.

“Eh? Tsukishima?!” Hinata is perched on the stool to Kei’s immediate right. He reacts with this offensive amount of bewilderment every time. He leans into Kei’s periphery, face practically ashen with shock. “Are you lost?”

“You’re asking _him_ that?” Kuroo chimes in from down the bar.

“Please stay out of this, Kuroo-san,” Kei says, and orders a hot amazake.

“What are you coming into a bar and ordering something non-alcoholic for?” Hinata snaps. “You know this place is, like, _cool_ , right? Weird old man.”

“Where’s Kageyama?” Kei asks.

“Toilet,” Hinata answers, pouting and taking a swig of his beer. “Yamaguchi?”

Kei sourly takes a toothpick from the jar at his elbow and fiddles with it. “How should I know?”

Kuroo snickers. “Ah, the face of a spurned lover…”

“Kuroo-san, I’m warning you.”

“Eh? I’m not sure what that other word means, but lover?” Hinata is suddenly very interested, scooting as close to Kei as he can without falling. His hair and eyes are glowing in the golden lamplight, and now he’s too close for Kei to be able to look away. “Tsukishima, do you need _love advice_?”

“No,” Kei snaps.

“You do!” Hinata exclaims. Kei must really be slipping. “ _Ah_!” He slams a fist onto the bar. “You don’t actually like Yamaguchi, do you?”

“So what if I do?” Kei mutters. It’s both real and not, revelation and reflex.

“No way!” Hinata yells. Kei whacks him in the arm. “Ow! Don’t be stingy, Tsukishima! You can’t just tell me that you’re capable of love and then hit me!”

“Do you think you could handle being slightly less loud?” Kei hisses as the bartender sets his drink down in front of him. “Is that too much to ask?”

“You can’t distract me!” Hinata levels a finger at Kei’s nose, peering at him with great scrutiny. “Do you really have a thing for Yamaguchi-san? Like, _really_? If you’re lying, I’ll smack you, jerk.”

“Why?”

Hinata blinks at him with those big, idiotic brown eyes. “Why are you a jerk? I mean, I guess I do have a list—”

“No,” Kei sighs, unable to disguise his exasperation, “why will you smack me if I’m lying?”

Hinata blinks at him again, a good few times. It’s rare for anything to silence him so effectively. Kei suddenly feels horribly _seen_ , though he doesn’t have the slightest clue why.

“Are you serious?” Hinata finally asks. “Wait. Wait, you can’t _tell_?”

He watches Kei for another moment, mouth agape, and then his features assemble into perhaps the most insufferably smug expression Kei has ever seen.

“Hoho.” Hinata leans over, propping his cheek up with his fist and smirking. “You must be pretty stupid, Tsukishima.”

Kei stands up from the stool and pulls out his wallet. “Thank you, have a good night.”

“No, wait!” Hinata lunges over and grabs Kei’s sleeve, undeterred by the vicious glare it earns him. “Sorry! I won’t make fun of you, I promise!”

Kei stares down his nose at Hinata’s imploring face. “What are you so worked up for?”

“W-Well,” Hinata mumbles, slackening his grip into a small pinch, “I guess it’s none of my business, but… I think Yamaguchi-san is into you, so… for his sake…”

Kei slowly sits back down.

“Oops,” Hinata squeaks.

“Nicely done, little guy,” Kuroo singsongs.

Kei squints at Hinata and says in a low voice, “Five minutes. Explain.”

Hinata flaps his mouth wordlessly for a few moments, eyes darting this way and that as if searching for an escape route, before he drops his head in defeat.

“Yamaguchi has a crush on you,” he blurts out in one breath, wincing. “Like—a huge, huge crush. It’s horrible.”

Kei is under the impression that this kind of bald-faced betrayal is not par for the course for Hinata, who regularly gives off the impression that he would throw himself into oncoming traffic for a friend—but these must be extenuating circumstances. His face is red, and his words are a little slurred, and there’s almost an edge of envy to them.

“He’s always, like—staring at you,” Hinata goes on, turning away to stoop sadly over his half-empty beer glass. “And asking how you’re doing… and staring at you some more. And laughing at your terrible, mean jokes.”

Kei’s heart is beating very fast. Faster than he’d previously thought hearts were healthily capable of beating.

“Don’t tell him I said anything,” Hinata mumbles, his voice echoing in his glass as he tips it back. “I don’t even think he, like, notices.”

“He didn’t—tell you _himself_ ,” Kei struggles to say.

Hinata makes a face. “No, but it’s _super_ obvious. Even Kageyama can tell.” Kei doubts that. “Why don’t you just ask him out?”

“Why don’t I just ask him out,” Kei repeats, caustic. “Sure. Because it would be _so_ simple.”

“Are you kidding?!” Hinata cries. “It would be super easy!”

“I expect it would seem that way for a single-celled organism.”

“The little guy has a point,” Kuroo chimes in, entirely unwelcome. “Come on, Glasses-kun. You only live once.”

“Thank you,” Kei deadpans, “for that wonderful advice, Kuroo-san.”

“Quit antagonizing him, Kuro,” Kenma mutters without looking up from his phone.

“Who’s antagonizing him? I’m just imparting some wisdom. It’s out of the goodness of my heart, Kenma. Shouldn’t you be swept off your feet?”

“I find it hard to believe you’d be that straightforward about helping _anyone_ ,” Kei says.

Kuroo affects an angelic air, laying a hand over his chest. “I’m always this kind.”

Kei and Hinata both stare blankly at him for several seconds before Hinata whips back around and chirps, “Anyway.”

He jabs his fingers into Kei’s ribs several times, his focus renewed. “Just tell him the truth, you know? Just say, ‘Hey, Yamaguchi-san, I know I’m horrible and don’t deserve you, but I like you, let’s go on a date and get married.’ See? I just did it for you.”

“Heart-stopping,” Kei says, shoving his hand away, even though his heart had in fact stopped at the word _married_.

“You know that Yamaguchi likes you because of the two seconds you’ve been nice in front of him, right?” Hinata plows on. “So just be nice, except for longer than two seconds. If you want tips, he likes talking and French fries.”

Kei wonders how fast he’d have to move to escape without Hinata latching onto his arm again.

“Maybe you’re just not ready for a _mature relationship_ ,” Hinata says thoughtfully into his beer.

Kei scoffs. “Like you would know.”

“I do know!” Hinata exclaims, clearly pleased with himself. “I’ve dated at least three people!”

“Going on three dates with Aone-san from Security does not count.”

“I-It was _four_ dates!” Hinata snaps, poking Kei in the side again. “You’re just jealous I have more game than you!”

Before Kei can give the proper caustic attention to the fact that Hinata has just spoken that sentence, to _him_ , Kageyama sidles into view. He looks gravely offended to find that Kei has appeared in his absence.

“Tsukishima,” he grunts by way of a greeting.

“Your Majesty,” Kei replies.

Hinata pats the stool next to him, and blessedly, Kageyama takes it rather than the one to Kei’s left. Hinata looks even more miniscule than usual between the two of them.

“You took forever,” he whines to Kageyama. “Tsukishima showed up and I had to _talk_ to him, all by myself.”

“Next time try not talking,” Kageyama says, but he looks weirdly apologetic. “Did I really take that long?”

“A million years!” Hinata flings both of his arms in the air for emphasis. Kageyama glares at him with a mixture of annoyance and—something Kei absolutely does not have the energy to dissect right now. Just thinking about it is giving him a headache.

“Anyway, I mean what I said, Tsukishima,” Hinata says, all mysteriously, leaning over until he bumps into Kei’s arm. “Kuroo-san’s right. You only live once.”

“I _am_ right, aren’t I?” Kuroo says.

Kei turns his head stiffly away, sets his elbows on the bar, and stares into the surface of his untouched amazake. Some steam wafts from it, fogging up the edges of his glasses. He watches the shapes it makes as Kageyama and Hinata talk beside him—and he thinks.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Tsukishima? You okay?”

Kei glances up, lifting his chin from where it’s propped in his hand. Yamaguchi has just finished his miso soup. Kei had used the previous day to finish the edition of the _Hyakunin Isshu_ in the inn library, third bookcase, first shelf. He’s been working his way through and has two bookcases left to go.

Yamaguchi’s dinosaur shirt is especially cute today. His hair looks a little more tousled than Kei remembers, although he knows he’s probably imagining it, manufacturing variety from the mundane. By now, Kei has memorized the way the light from each window lands on it and the way the longer strands frame his face, shifting when he eats or talks or laughs.

He tries never to miss lunch with Yamaguchi these days. It makes him so happy when Kei joins him, after all, and otherwise he’d be by himself—and he does look nice in this particular light. The rest of the time, Kei has kept his distance. It would be creepy if he didn’t, or at least would feel creepy, and he knows that Yamaguchi’s got better things to do than entertain him; oftentimes he’ll see Yamaguchi in passing eating a pancake at the dessert café or finding a manga he likes in the bookstore or going on a pleasant walk alone.

He finds himself paying a lot of attention to Yamaguchi, these days.

Today, however, he has not been paying very much attention at all, because he has been thinking all morning about how to ask Yamaguchi out.

It would just be for a day, he’s been telling himself, and if it’s a bad date, or if Yamaguchi says no, he can always try again when or if he feels like it. Besides, Yamaguchi likes him, right? So there’s no way he’d reject him to begin with. The stakes are not very high, he tells himself, even as he surreptitiously wipes his sweaty palms on his pants; it really isn’t a big deal. He could ask out anyone in Karuizawa just to see what happens; Yamaguchi is no different.

“Tsukishima?” Yamaguchi prods him again, hesitantly waving a freckled hand in front of Kei’s face. When Kei doesn’t respond, he makes a doubtful noise and reaches for his tea.

Kei considers various approaches and decides on the simplest one.

“Go out with me,” he says.

Yamaguchi’s eyes, closed peacefully mid-drink only a second ago, snap open. He makes a choking noise into his cup, spitting half of his tea back into it. He slams the cup onto the table.

“ _What_?” he squawks, coughing.

Kei affects an air of nonchalance, even though the drumming of his heart is deafening.

“Go out with me,” he says again.

Yamaguchi furiously wipes his mouth with his sleeve. He lifts his black napkin from his lap and starts using it to mop up the spilled tea.

“I-Is this a joke?” he rasps, and glances at Kei’s face. “Okay, not a joke. Okay.”

“Is it weird?” Kei asks plainly.

Yamaguchi lets out a laugh, but it sounds a little frantic. He’s still wiping the table, even though the tea spill is definitely gone by now.

“Um, no, not _weird_ …” Right. Bad liar. “Just—kind of…”

Kei adjusts his glasses so that he has an excuse to hide his mouth behind one hand. “Surprising?”

Yamaguchi nods. “Yeah. That.” He pauses. “Are you _sure_ this isn’t a joke?”

“I’m sure,” Kei says.

“You want me to go out with you,” Yamaguchi says, voice cracking.

“Yeah,” Kei says.

Yamaguchi is silent for a moment. He lets out that laugh again, much weaker this time. His wrist slows its circling over the table, and his fingers tighten into the fabric of the napkin, and he says:

“No thanks.”

“Oh,” Kei says, with the distinct feeling that something inside his chest has just snapped like a brittle twig under a boot. “Oh.”

“Sorry,” Yamaguchi mumbles, barely even a word. His shoulders are hunched at his ears, as if he’s trying to fold in on himself.

“It’s fine,” Kei lies.

“I mean, it’s just,” Yamaguchi says, “I mean, y-you’re really good-looking, and, um, smart, but—”

“You think I’m good-looking?” Kei asks stupidly before he can stop himself.

Yamaguchi winces. “But I just, um.” The colors of his dinosaur shirt look a little uglier now, clashing too vividly in the bright room. “I don’t really know.” He says again, “Sorry.”

“Shut up.” It’s unkind; he knows, but it’s out before he can tame it. He’ll feel guilty for it later. “It’s always ‘sorry, sorry’ with you. Just forget it. Forget I even said anything.”

Yamaguchi’s face is wrenched with pain and it’s a hundred times worse than the disgust or the disappointment. “Tsukishima…”

“You were right,” Kei says. “It was a joke.” He fishes out his wallet from the pocket of his jeans and drops a twenty-yen bill on the table. “I’ll make my own way back to Tokyo. Don’t wait on me. See you.”

He returns the _Hyakunin Isshu_ to the shelf and takes the next book to his room, some translation of a contemporary English memoir about deep sea diving. He can’t process a word of it, scowling at the pages as he lies face-up on the floor of his room with his legs crossed under the kotatsu, listening to the ambient noise of the snow gathering outside the window. The only thing his mind can seem to process is the memory of how Yamaguchi had looked at him in the light of the slow winter morning—like Kei had somehow already managed to hurt him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“ _Stay with me…_   _I knock on the door at midnight—I cried without going home—that season is_ —”

Kei’s body wakes before the rest of him. He rips the alarm clock from the plug and flings it against the opposite wall.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Yamaguchi does not like me,” Kei says.

Hinata, startled, chokes on a gulp of his beer. Down the bar, Kuroo snickers.

“Eh? Tsukishima?!” Hinata coughs, beating a fist against his chest and looking up at Kei with watering eyes. “Are you lost?”

This time Kei has gotten there early enough that Kageyama has not yet gone to the bathroom. He’s on the stool to Hinata’s right with a glass of milk and a look of alarm.

“Yamaguchi does not like me,” Kei repeats, short of breath and tired and desperate. “What do I do.”

Kuroo’s snicker turns into a full-blown hyenaish cackle. Kenma clicks his tongue. Hinata is gaping at Kei with the shock of someone who’s just seen an explosion.

“Huh?” he says. “Huh? _Huh_?”

“Who the hell ever said Yamaguchi liked you?” asks Kageyama, and he looks accusingly at Hinata.

“ _I_ didn’t!” Hinata retorts, and looks accusingly at Kageyama.

“Me either!”

“I don’t have time for this,” Kei snaps, even though, theoretically, he does. “I asked him out. He said no. He doesn’t like me.”

Hinata practically rockets out of his seat. “You _what_?!”

“Huh,” says Kageyama, looking suddenly uncomfortable.

“He said what?” Hinata is all but toppling over the bar. “What? _What_? You did _what_? Do you _like him_?!”

The shock is converted into glee in under a second. Kei grimaces at the ceiling and lets the silence be his answer.

“Obviously he likes him,” Kageyama barges in. “Why else would he ask him out? Idiot.”

“Did you _tell_ him?” Hinata yells.

Kei stares at him. “No?”

Hinata stares back. And stares. And _stares_.

“What?” Kei demands.

“Uh, I have to take a…” Kageyama rises abruptly, then stops himself. “Pee.”

Kei is struck by the urge to put his head in his hands and leave it there for all time. So, so obvious. As Kageyama walks to the bathrooms with all the casual grace of a corpse with rigor mortis, Hinata watches him go, swaying intermittently on his stool.  

“What’s with him?” he mutters, a little slurred, a little tender. His brow is wrinkled unattractively. “Stupid Kageyama.”

Kei sits down without taking his coat off. Hinata frowns into the contents of his glass and lets out a soft, wistful sigh. Kei wouldn’t have thought him capable of carrying so many emotions at once, but that sigh betrays them all. Kei’s eyes wander to the hallway down which Kageyama had disappeared. He drums his fingers absentmindedly on the bar. Hinata sighs again, this one even more wistful than the last. He looks pitiful.

Kei props up an elbow on the wood and slowly settles his chin into his palm.

“You and Kageyama,” he says.

Hinata whirls to face him, nearly knocking over his glass. He could not look more alarmed even if Kei were to strike him with a cattle prod.

“What!” He barks out a hysterical laugh. “Haha! What!”

“You’re already stupid enough as it is. Watching you pretend to be is just sad.”

“Wh-Wh-Wh-What did you do with the real Tsukishima?” Hinata stutters. “Y-You know he’s allergic to this stuff, right? Feelings? Y-Y-You’re being a little obvious!”

Kei shrugs and decides to tell the truth: “I’m bored.” Because he _is_ —bored of Hinata’s half-empty beer glass and Hinata’s plaid shirt, bored of the red leather stool and the charred smell of yakitori, bored of the bleak mountains and the storm that starts at noon and the books he’s read twice and the fir trees outside his window, the broken heater and the song he cannot stand; bored of wanting Yamaguchi and of the empty, horizonless winter.

Hinata seems a little different, now that Kei is really and truly looking. It’s more evident in Kageyama’s absence. Kei is so used to watching the two of them squabble without pausing for air that to see how Hinata’s posture has wilted now—to see his typically blazing eyes look forlorn and contemplative—is difficult for even his stone heart to treat with indifference.

When had that happened?

“Bored?” Hinata turns the word over thoughtfully, as if searching for some indication that it’s a ruse. His brow wrinkles even more deeply. He’s squinting at his knees. “Tsukishima… bored…” He gulps. “Hey. Um. Tsukishima?”

“What?”

“I’m sad.”

The bones of a laugh take shape behind Kei’s teeth.

“Yeah,” he says.

Hinata drops his fluffy orange head onto the bar, his cheek making a dull _thump_ against the wood. He lets out a long, settling breath through his nose, and it sounds a little wet.

“Tsukishima?” he asks in a tiny voice.

“What?”

“Tsukishima…” He sniffles, reaching up to dab at his nose with the cuff of his sleeve. “Are you sad, too?”

“Yeah.”

Hinata is very quiet for a moment. Being able to sense him thinking so deeply is a little unsettling.

“About this stuff?” he ventures. “Or about other stuff?”

“Both,” says Kei.

“Oh,” Hinata says. “That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

More quiet. Kageyama still hasn’t come back from the bathroom. Kei’s wandering eyes had snagged on the glint of a bright green bottle against the back mirror and are now settled there, gazing through the facets where the light glows.

“Yamaguchi does like you,” Hinata finally mumbles. “He really does.” He sniffles again. He doesn’t wipe his nose this time. “Must be nice. Having the person you like… like you.”

“You’d think it would be that simple, wouldn’t you?”

“It can be,” Hinata says. “He rejected you, huh?”

Kei grimaces at the memory like some wounded high schooler. “Yeah.”

Hinata huffs. “Stupid Yamaguchi.”

“Please don’t make me say out loud that I want your advice,” Kei says.

Hinata lifts his head a little, hair catching in the lamplight like the sun Karuizawa forgot. “ _My_ advice?”

He’s quiet for a long time.

“You seem different, Tsukishima,” he finally says.

Kei hums in reply, watching the snow tumble beyond the windowpane and gradually accumulate the streets and rooftops, the same as always. He really does hate the winter.

“I guess,” Hinata says slowly, with more thought than Kei had honestly believed his brain capable of processing at one time, “if he said no, you should respect it. But… he probably said no because he felt like you were making fun of him. Or like you didn’t care.” He squints, leaning closer as if to see Kei better. “ _Do_ you care?”

The answer would require so little effort. A syllable, nothing more. _Yes_. But a tension in Kei’s jaw restrains it, questions it. Whatever he would need to utter it, especially to Hinata, he has not yet learned.

He runs from it, in the end. “I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“Mm.” Hinata’s eyes are dull and scornful as he turns away from Kei and sets his finger on the rim of his glass. “Maybe you’re not that different after all.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Yamaguchi,” Kei asks four-ish days later in the shrine courtyard, “can I speak to you about a matter that is not work-related?”

Yamaguchi glances up from where he’s helping to break down the camera and narrows his eyes, but he’s smiling. The tips of his ears are scarlet.

“You never talk about work,” he says.  

Kei flicks his eyes away from Yamaguchi’s face and addresses the trunk of a nearby cedar.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

Yamaguchi’s arm falters in the middle of looping a cord.

“I… guess,” he answers. “Why?”

“I just wondered,” Kei says, “if you wanted to get lunch. And then dessert. And then…” Recalculating… “Go… for… a walk.”

Silence.

The cord slowly slips out of Yamaguchi’s slackened hand.

“Why?” he blurts out.

Kei had prepared himself for a wide array of responses. That was not one of them.

“I…” he says, “want to?”

Yamaguchi evaluates this, lower lip jutting out thoughtfully. Then he repeats, “Why?”

Kei can feel his cheeks getting warmer despite the atrocious chill in the air. Yamaguchi isn’t being deliberately difficult, or anything—he just seems to be genuinely confused. Kei isn’t sure what to do with that.

“Because…” He casts around for an eloquent way to say it. “I want to get to know you. As a coworker.”

“I thought you said this wasn’t about work,” Yamaguchi rasps.

“As a person, then,” Kei says.

Yamaguchi stares back at him a moment longer. Then he lowers his tense shoulders and smiles, scrunched eyes and white teeth, and it snatches the breath from Kei’s chest.

“Sure!” His hair flops over his eyes when he bobs his head in a nod. “Sounds fun!”

He loops up the dropped cord with much more alacrity than before. He’s already finished by the time Kei thinks of offering to help.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They wind up at the Usui Pass Observation Platform, which is a short but harrowing bus ride from Kyu-Karuizawa up into the hills overlooking the mountain range for which Karuizawa is arguably famous. It doesn’t take long for Yamaguchi to run out of breath, but if anything the walk and the cold seem to exhilarate him. Kei, who notoriously detests scenery, fresh air, and the outdoors, is too busy focusing on this to be appropriately miserable.

Yamaguchi wanders to the railing to crane his neck back and gaze in wonder at the gauzy silhouette of Mt. Asama. Kei lingers a few steps behind him, then follows. He comes to a stop at his side with his hands in his coat pockets and his mouth buried in his scarf.

“Amazing,” Yamaguchi breathes.

“If you like that kind of thing,” Kei says, but truth be told, the view and Yamaguchi’s starstruck reaction to it have conspired to snatch the air from his chest, just for a moment.

Yamaguchi’s laugh is quiet and brief. He leans forward, elbows perched on the railing, one foot crossing over the other.

“So,” he says. “Um… what do you want to know?”

“About what?”

“Me,” Yamaguchi replies, sounding embarrassed. “As a coworker or a person.”

The first answer that bobs to the surface is _everything_ , but that would be a bit much.

“Mm,” Kei replies. “I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.” Which is a lie. He has thought extensively far ahead. He has been mentally compiling a list. He turns his head to take in the mountain range, suppressing a shiver when a gust of wind rushes by, and settles for: “What’s your favorite season?”

“Fall,” Yamaguchi says. His voice rises at the end, like he’s not sure if that’s the correct answer. Kei adjusts his scarf to hide his smile.  

“Your favorite food?”

“French fries!” He sounds _much_ more confident about that. “Especially the soft, floppy kind! They’re just not as good if they’re all crispy. You know?”

Kei doesn’t. “Huh.”

“And they’re super good when you dip them in a strawberry milkshake,” Yamaguchi adds with an air of sagacity befitting of a philosopher. “The saltiness and the fruitiness… it’s the best.”

He has no right to be so _casual_ about it, as if he’s completely unaware that strawberry is Kei’s favorite flavor of anything, ever. Kei tries to neutrally say, “Hm,” but it makes him sound like he’s just choked on something.  

“And,” he asks, scrambling for a topic that doesn’t have the risk of striking him dead, “where are you from?”

“Miyagi,” Yamaguchi says. “Near the coast. My grandparents live in Ueda, though, so we go there a lot in the summer. What about you?”

Kei frowns. “What about me?”

“I mean,” Yamaguchi says, face reddening, “I want to know about you, too. A-As a coworker… and a person.”

The pace of Kei’s heart quickens. He says, “Ah.”

A peculiar sadness sinks onto him, then, even as Yamaguchi’s face eases into an innocent, expectant smile. He has told him this so many times, until the act of offering it had lost its significance. He has told him about the roads and the three mountains and the old houses and the rainy summers, the train station and the riverbank and the vanishing beeches, the way Morioka Castle lights up every night. Each time, the details are unmade. His hometown feels invented, now—a lost civilization.  

His voice is softer than he intends it to be. “Iwate.”

Yamaguchi is clearly expecting more, but Kei can’t muster the strength to go over all of it again. He bows his head to look at his hands, tangling the fingers together for want of something to do.

“What do you do for fun?” he asks after a moment.

“Um… read, play video games, go for walks.” Yamaguchi’s glance evades his own. “Sometimes I play volleyball.”

Whatever gentle smile had begun to take form on Kei’s mouth vanishes in a second.

He had played a little of that, too, in junior high—he had even held childish aspirations of playing for the Olympic team. He had realized later that those aspirations had been nothing more than poorly disguised reflections of his brother’s, shapeless and distorted, and the weight of them hadn’t been as satisfying to carry then. He thinks of those aspirations as Yamaguchi might have had them, and then he thinks of the old trophies on his brother’s shelf, still displayed so proudly even after—

“Seriously?” he blurts out.

Yamaguchi lets out a self-effacing laugh and scratches lightly at the side of his cheek.

“Y-Yeah,” he mumbles. “I started in junior high, and played on my school’s team, but—I was pretty much on the bench all three years. I was a pinch server. I tried to learn some fancy serves, but. In the end, I only got to play in one game.” His voice quiets. “I messed up, and… um, we lost.”

“And you still play?” Kei’s lip curls; his nose pinches. “What for?”

He can tell the second the words leave his mouth that they are maybe the worst thing he could possibly have said. Yamaguchi stiffens, shoulders hunching forward, as if in response to an unexpected blow.

He’s silent for a moment. It may be the longest measurable moment of Kei’s life.

“Yeah, I do,” he finally says. His voice sounds different, measured, _cold_. “What do you mean, ‘what for?’”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Kei mutters, not looking at him. _Why isn’t it stopping?_ “You wasted three years on it just so you could lose on your first try. What’s the point of all that effort, then? If it had been me, I’d have quit.”

“Okay, but it wasn’t you,” says Yamaguchi says, facing him now with one hand still gripping the railing. “It was me. And I kept playing because I wanted to. What more do you need for something like that than pride?”

It’s the closest to shouting that Kei has ever heard him come. Out of words, he stares back, wide-eyed. Yamaguchi is breathing hard, his cheeks flushed from outrage now rather than something more pleasant. His features look crumpled and embarrassed. He bows his head, mouth and chin vanishing behind his scarf.

“I think I’m ready to go back,” he says quietly, but on the empty platform, it pulses through Kei’s bones like thunder.

Yamaguchi doesn’t so much as look at him for the whole bus ride back to town.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 _Pride, huh_. Kei finds himself returning to the components of that word more frequently than he’d have expected in the days that follow his trainwreck of a first date with Yamaguchi. _Pride_. Like, pride in yourself? Dignity? Doing something worth being proud of? Stubbornness dressed up as something more noble? Each sounds more ridiculous than the last—the kind of thing someone hot-blooded and simple-minded like Hinata would find meaningful—but it had clearly meant something to Yamaguchi. Kei’s implicit disdain for it, by turns, had meant too much.

But it’s fine, he thinks, toying with his empty glass in a bar he doesn’t like on a day he still hasn’t counted. It’s fine, even though he hasn’t had the guts to look a totally clueless Yamaguchi in the eye for almost a week. It’s fine. There’s always tomorrow.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Um… read, play video games, go for walks. Sometimes I play volleyball.”

“Volleyball?” Kei replies, making sure to raise his eyebrows to make the faux surprise more convincing. “Me too.”

Yamaguchi’s head whips around to him eagerly. “You do?”

Kei feels himself starting to smile, and looks out over the mountain range to disguise it. “Yeah. I played in junior high, too. I gave up on it, though. Felt stupid to play something I knew I’d just end up losing at.” He shrugs, but the sentiments feel too close, clearer and sharper than they’d been when he practiced them. “Pride wasn’t enough for me back then, I guess.”

He tries to glance surreptitiously at Yamaguchi’s face to evaluate his expression.

“Eh?” Yamaguchi croaks. “What did you just say?”

“I mean,” Kei says, “what more do you need for something like that than pride, right?”

Yamaguchi is completely silent. Kei can’t even hear him breathing.

Just when concern starts to seep in, Yamaguchi’s hand surges out and grips the lapel of his coat. Kei starts to turn his head, heart jumping in confusion, and then Yamaguchi presses a dry kiss to his lips.

It can hardly even be considered a kiss—a peck would be more accurate. Yamaguchi has pulled back before Kei can even register the sensation. The aftershock pulses through him, a full-bodied warmth, a flock of birds, a sudden burst of light.

He’d closed his eyes without thinking. He opens them dazedly, barely halfway. Yamaguchi’s mitten is still at his collar. Kei’s heart beats away beneath it, changing substance, renaming itself.

“What…” The innate knowledge of how to speak has suddenly fallen to the back of his brain, as distant and muddled as a memory of childhood. “What was that… for…?”

“Um—” Yamaguchi rasps through pink lips, pink cheeks, glassy eyes, a plain and gentle hunger, still clutching Kei’s coat with one steady, unmoving hand. “Um… I…”

Kei has never in his life wanted to be so close to something as he does to Yamaguchi’s breathing body, right then. He doesn’t care where they are or who might see them. He doesn’t care about anything but the touch of Yamaguchi’s hand at his chest. The space between their faces is negligible at best. Yamaguchi’s breath washes faintly over his parted lips.

This is the only thing Kei will ever want for again. This. Just like this.

But then something in Yamaguchi’s eyes clears, crystallizes. Doubt. He blinks rapidly and pushes himself back, his hand falling away from Kei’s body. That miraculous warmth evaporates in his wake.

Kei feels a cold beyond a thousand winters, watching Yamaguchi’s face close up again, recognizing the anxiety at the center of it as a kind of fragile mistrust. Maybe it’s self-preservation. He can relate.

“N-Never mind—sorry,” Yamaguchi says, and covers his mouth with one hand, and looks at the ground between their feet. “I’m really sorry—”

“No,” Kei breathes, completely still. “It’s fine.”

And it is, it _is_ ; he can’t begin to convey how fine it is—but somewhere between his heart and his mouth it’s muddled into a dismissal rather than a promise. He watches Yamaguchi’s wince, his scarlet face; watches as he briefly lays his hand over his eyes to hide them from Kei’s view.

In the bony winter quiet, Yamaguchi thickly says, “I think I’m ready to go back.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“You,” Hinata splutters, beer dribbling down his chin, “you k… kuh… _kuh_ …”

“Kissed,” Kuroo fills in helpfully.

“I have to take a pee,” Kageyama grunts, and leaves.

 

 

* * *

 

 

So. The kiss may have changed Kei’s life, assuming that’s still a concept that applies to whatever his existence has become, but the variables that have to align for it to happen are tricky to maintain.

Bluntly put, Kei had not previously realized it was possible to screw so many things up in so many different ways, so many times.

Whatever half-baked “advice” he can manage to pry out of Hinata only gets him so far, to the point that he has to wonder if he’s missing something. _Be yourself, Tsukishima. Show him you care, Tsukishima_. What is he supposed to do with that, anyway? When has being himself ever done him any favors with anyone, let alone someone like Yamaguchi, who’s smart and nice and friendly and handsome, and easy to talk to but maybe not easy to charm?

So rather than play it by ear, which has been his method up to this point, he decides to develop a strategy. Using infinite opportunities to rewind time could be considered cheating, sure, but the mistakes and missteps it enables him to bypass get him through that moral quandary pretty efficiently. And he begins, unconsciously, to count the days again.

He starts by making a list. To start with, Yamaguchi does like French fries; Hinata’s intel had been right on that front. He likes talking, but not small talk. He doubts himself easily. He likes going on walks and stopping to pet strangers’ dogs. He has expressed an interest in trying the pancakes at the dessert café downtown.

 _Jackpot_.

“What’s your favorite color?”

The dessert café is crowded and cheerily lit and all of the walls are white. Assorted trendy houseplants fill in the corners and gaps with green. Some ivy has been trained to creep along the ceiling. The tables all have doilies on them instead of placemats. The pancakes are very fluffy.

Were Kei still possessed of the ability to dream, he knows he’d be dreaming about Yamaguchi’s mouth every single night. It would have been easier to handle in sleep. Doing it while he’s awake, trying fruitlessly to distract himself with something else like a book or a walk or standing in front of the bank to decide whether or not he actually wants to follow through on that plan to rob it, just to see what happens, is tantamount to torture. He can barely align the parts of his brain to think about anything else, even now.

Yamaguchi looks up. The bustle of the waiters and other customers fades from Kei’s perception. Yamaguchi’s face goes from trepidatious to, if Kei is feeling deliriously optimistic, a little endeared.

“Green,” he says with a decisive nod.

“Green?” Kei asks. He had expected something different. Orange, maybe. Not that he’s thought about it, or anything.

Yamaguchi smiles. Kei’s whole body feels lighter. “Yeah. Oh, but—” He wrinkles his nose a little, as if picturing something unpleasant. “Not, like, a really dark green, more like—more like a forest on a sunny day, when the sunlight—”

He sits up a little and lifts his arm, fingers fluttering gently in the air, down and then back up again.

“When the sunlight comes down through the leaves,” he says. Something in his expression is glowing. He lowers his arm again and turns his head to gaze out at the bare, snow-laden black branches bent outside the window. “You know what I mean?”

Kei nearly closes his eyes to envision it but somehow manages to restrain himself. He’s mesmerized by the nuances that shift across Yamaguchi’s face, each as fleeting as—well. As sunlight through leaves. Nostalgia, contentment, some faint vestige of melancholy.

 _Let’s go right now_ , Kei wants to say; _let’s get on a plane and go somewhere where it never snows and there are trees everywhere and you can tell me about every single one_.

What he says instead is, “Kind of.”

Yamaguchi’s face settles back into its normal cast. He abandons his view of the branches, focusing again on Kei with his elbows on the table and his arms neatly folded.

“What about you?” he asks with a smile that nearly topples Kei from his chair.

“Me?”

“Yeah. Your favorite color. What is it?”

 _Green like sunlight through leaves_ , Kei’s besotted heart answers. He wishes it were possible to drive his butter knife into it for even conceiving of something so monumentally embarrassing.

“Um,” Kei says, because he’s never really thought about it before. “I guess… purple?”

Yamaguchi gapes at him, eyes comically wide. “P-Purple?”

“Yes?” His ears absolutely do not feel hot. Nope. “I don’t know, my mom bought me a lot of—purple stuff when I was a kid—there was this, uh, hoodie with a moon on it that my brother gave—”

“A moon?! That’s so cute!” Yamaguchi blurts out, and then immediately claps both hands over his mouth. “I mean—uh—you—you have a brother?”

A bit of a clumsy save, but Kei will give it to him. The word echoes hopelessly in his brain: _cute, cute, cute_.

“Yes,” he replies, before his faculties catch up to the fact that he has just told Yamaguchi about Akiteru. Might as well go all the way, then. “He’s… older.”

“What does he do?” Yamaguchi sounds really interested now. He’s practically beaming with enthusiasm. Kei could never have predicted that Akiteru is so fascinating.

“He… he’s just an office worker,” Kei answers, blinking. “He’s not. _That_ interesting?”

“I just had no idea, that’s all,” Yamaguchi says. “Are you two close?”

Kei considers this. In the span of about thirty seconds he has found himself treading precarious territory. If it were any other person, he’d be annoyed by the brazenness of the questions, but Yamaguchi is looking at him so _sincerely_ , and no matter how many times he lives through this day, that look will not get any easier to deny.

“We… aren’t… I don’t know, I guess we are,” he stammers. _Come on_. He quickly grabs his fork and stabs it into the pancake so he will have something to occupy himself with. “It’s a long story, but—we—weren’t for a while. Now, though…”

Oh.

His eyes are stinging, suddenly.

That’s annoying.

Does being here mean he’ll never see Akiteru again? He guesses so.

Maybe he could call him when he goes back to his room. Send him a mail. Ask him how his week has been, what he did for Risshun. If maybe for old times’ sake, they could pull out the volleyball the next time he comes home—

“Oh—oh, Tsukishima, I’m—I’m sorry!” Yamaguchi is sputtering when he comes back to himself. “I shouldn’t have—that was so forward of me to just ask you that out of nowhere—it’s none of my business at all—sorry, Tsuki—”

“Shut up, Yamaguchi,” Kei hears himself say.

There’s no bite to it. Still, Yamaguchi winces. Kei breathes in and lifts a hand in apology.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “That was rude.”

“N-No, no, it’s okay,” Yamaguchi says, shaking his head. “I mean. It was, a little. But I was rude, too. S-Sorry.”

“Now we’re both sorry,” Kei says.

“Heh,” says Yamaguchi. “Yeah.”

“So there’s no reason to keep feeling guilty.” Kei takes off his glasses, cleaning them gently with his napkin. “We’re even. Right?”

“Right!” Yamaguchi chirps, eyes scrunching.

This is becoming unbearable. Those are _dimples_.

“Finish your pancake,” Kei mutters, cutting precisely into what’s left of his own. Yamaguchi gives him no pushback, picking up his knife and fork with renewed zeal.

They eat the rest of their pancakes in a silence that feels almost companionable. Kei pays the bill before Yamaguchi can even get his wallet out of his pocket; when he realizes what Kei’s done, he flushes indignantly and scolds him for it, even though he’d have been fine with a _thank you_ , or something. But Kei doesn’t mind. Yamaguchi is kind of funny when he’s pretending to be mad.

They walk along the main road with their hoods up and their hands in their coat pockets, talking idly, heading nowhere in particular. The blizzard has abated since the early afternoon, and now the snow is coming down more lightly, in fragile flakes that melt on Kei’s cheek the moment they touch it.

“What about your family?” Kei asks.

Yamaguchi glances over at him with his eyebrows arched. His scarf is tucked snugly around his chin, so his mouth his half-hidden.

He points to himself. “Mine?”

Kei nods.

“Well, um,” Yamaguchi says, turning his head back to look out at the road while they walk, “my parents split up when I was really little, and I grew up with my mom. She’s an elementary school principal. I don’t really know what my dad does. I don’t talk to him anymore.”

“Me either,” Kei says, and at Yamaguchi’s puzzled look he stutters, “I-I mean, not _your_ dad; I don’t talk to _my_ dad. Much.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Anyway,” Kei says. He gestures for him to continue.

“Anyway,” Yamaguchi parrots with a touch of amusement, “my mom raised me all by herself. Just me. I don’t have any siblings.”

“Do you wish you did?”

“What is this, an interview?” Yamaguchi laughs. “No, not really. It would’ve made it way harder on my mom, you know?”

“I see,” Kei says.

Yamaguchi lifts his shoulders apologetically. “My life is boring, Tsukishima.”

“It’s not,” Kei murmurs, and it might be the bravest thing he’s said in weeks.

Yamaguchi colors pleasantly and they lapse into a kind of shy silence, ambling past the townsfolk and tourists and storefronts, the restaurants and trinket stores. Yamaguchi’s face is half-burrowed in his scarf and the expression on it is undeniably content. Kei wonders if his own looks the same. It feels like it ought to.

The day passes more quickly than Kei notices until they’re walking out of the bookstore to a dusky, starless sky. Yamaguchi is so easy to talk to when Kei actually lets himself do it, with plenty to say about monster movies and classic Pokémon and volleyball and dogs. As they head back to the inn, Kei regales him with Bokuto stories until he’s stumbling through the snow with laughter. Yamaguchi’s laugh is so _nice_ , Kei thinks, marveling at the bright, breathless sound. He trawls his memory for every funny story he has and hams it up when he tells them, just to hear it a moment or two more.

The inn emerges through the trees ahead of them, the golden light from its windows casting a comfortable warmth over the still snow, as Kei concludes the tale of Bokuto’s tree-climbing incident. Yamaguchi is clutching his stomach with one hand and Kei’s shoulder with the other, his peals of laughter peppered with the occasional snort, which is frankly criminal. Kei finds himself laughing along, too, as easy and unconscious as a heartbeat. He wants the path ahead of them to keep stretching out, until the inn is so far away there’d be no sense in even going back.

“Hey, Yamaguchi.” He glances at him over the bridge of his nose, smile softening. “What made you decide to be a producer?”

Yamaguchi blinks owlishly at him. “Huh? I, um… hm.”

He hems and haws for a few seconds, chewing his lip. Kei hadn’t realized this was such a profound question.

“I guess…”

Then he stops walking. Kei takes a couple more steps before he realizes, halting and pivoting to face him. Yamaguchi’s brow is furrowed but his stare is wide and intense, focused on the pavement.

“I guess,” he says again. Then he seems to settle on something; he gives a short, decisive nod, clenching a fist with resolve. “I like being somebody who people can depend on.”

Kei stares at him, snow clustering in his hair. His heart does something that is horrifically close to fluttering.

“What?” Yamaguchi hides his face with his hands. “Aw, man. Was that embarrassing?”

“Not at all.”

“It sounds kind of self-serving when I say it out loud—”

“It’s an admirable reason,” Kei cuts him off. Certainly better than any reason he’s ever done something. “You sound like a hero in a manga or something.”

He does not say that Yamaguchi’s earnest revelation has made him realize something: that Yamaguchi is brave, and that Yamaguchi is terminally good-hearted, and that Yamaguchi looks unbearably nice with snowflakes scattered in his hair, and that Kei is perhaps a little bit in love with him.

No surfeit of second chances will save him from that.

“D-Do I?” Yamaguchi sounds pleased.

“Seriously,” Kei says. “That was cool.”

“It was super lame!”

“Shut up with that.”

“Sorry, Tsukki,” Yamaguchi says, and then claps a hand over his mouth. “Shima. Tsukishima.”

And Kei figures there’s no sense in pretending, if he’s going to be framed inside of February 3rd for all of eternity, and if Yamaguchi is going to sound so nice saying _Tsukki_. He bows his head to address his shoes.

“It’s fine,” he mumbles. “About the whole Tsukki thing, I don’t… hate it.” The conclusion is unplanned. “If it’s you.”

He can smell snow in the crisp night air, and wet larch and fir, and woodsmoke. Were it still daylight, he knows he’d see the Karuizawa fog creeping down the distant hills, settling among the conifers. And Yamaguchi is looking at him, with wide eyes and a pink nose and an open mouth, as though seeing him for the first time.

Kei ducks his hot face and turns to keep walking, grimacing out of Yamaguchi’s view. All that practice and he still can’t seem to resist making a complete fool of himself.

“Wait.”

Kei grits his teeth, a handful of dismissals and deflections gathering on his tongue, but when he cranes his neck, they scatter. Yamaguchi is beaming at him, so unapologetically affectionate that his eyes are glimmering. Kei is going to remember that expression forever.

“Tsukki,” Yamaguchi says, testing it out, and beams even wider. “I don’t care what Hinata says. I think it suits you.”

“You had me at ‘I don’t care what Hinata says.’”

Yamaguchi jogs to fall into step beside him, grinning as they approach the front door. “I had you?”

Kei glances at him, which is a terrible idea, because the sight of his delighted face is like a wrecking ball to whatever feeble defenses he has left.

 _Pride_ , he thinks, unbidden.

“Yeah,” he says, and opens the door.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Yamaguchi asks if they can go over the next day’s agenda in Kei’s room, and Kei, who hadn’t even expected to get this far, his past luck considered, agrees. He surreptitiously glances at his watch while Yamaguchi politely asks the innkeeper how his evening is going—18:42. Hinata and Kageyama are probably still at the bar, then. Karuizawa is a small town, but there’s still a reasonable enough distance between the inn and that bar that the likelihood of sabotage is low.

Kei unlocks the door and flicks on the lamp on the adjacent table, but the room is still pretty dark. Yamaguchi doesn’t seem to mind, sidling past him eagerly, as though there will be something more interesting in Kei’s room than an ugly kotatsu.

“Ah,” Yamaguchi says, laying his coat on the back of a chair and giving a short shiver, “your heater really _is_ broken.”

Kei shucks off his own coat and goes to hang it in the bathroom. “Did you think I was lying?”

“N-No,” Yamaguchi says with muffled amusement. “You just—seem like you get cold really easily, so I figured you were maybe… overreacting?”

“Cold is cold,” Kei says brusquely, walking back in and sliding the bathroom door closed behind him. He comes to a halt in the middle of the room, watching Yamaguchi inspect the interior like it’s some kind of museum exhibit. “It’s probably the same as yours, you know.”

Yamaguchi points to the balcony and grins. “But you have a nice view!”

“Mm,” Kei says, even though seeing Yamaguchi standing in front of it makes it about a hundred times nicer.

Yamaguchi only grins wider at Kei’s response, like he’d seen something in it that Kei hadn’t been aware of. After untying his shoes and setting them neatly next to Kei’s by the entryway, he pads across the floor to stand in front of the sliding glass door and peer out the window.

He lets out a short _ah_ of wonder, and while he’s distracted by the scenery Kei has a moment to let his eyes linger on the line of freckles dotting the side of his neck, darker and denser near the soft ridge of his jaw. Seeing Yamaguchi’s delight unguarded like this is a privilege he will never get sick of. He seems at home in Kei’s room, in such a way that the memory of its constant, inoffensive emptiness seems invented.

Kei’s heart beats sorely away in his chest, so heavy and insistent that he wonders if Yamaguchi can hear it.

“Yamaguchi,” he says.

“Hm?” Yamaguchi replies, still craning his neck to see into the forest.

“I need to,” Kei realizes halfway through the sentence that it isn’t going to sound all that natural, but it’s too late to take it back, “tell you something.”

That gets Yamaguchi’s attention. He swivels back toward Kei slowly, unsurely, his hands stiffer now in his pockets than they had been a moment ago. The distant lamplight grazes one side of his face, catches in one eye like a star, but the rest is harder to see.

Kei wants to forget all of the planning and guessing, wants to cross the room and take Yamaguchi’s unforgettable face in his cold hands and kiss him senseless. It must have been hundreds of days, now, since that first morning with the miso soup and the long drive down the crowded freeway. He can no longer remember what it’s like not to want someone this badly, aching beneath its weight.

Seeing Yamaguchi here, so close, without his coat or shoes, more real and alive than he’s maybe ever been to Kei, all of the disjointed pieces and whatever whole they’re supposed to be assembled into become irrelevant. That’s only life, after all. This is Yamaguchi.

“Oh,” Yamaguchi says. “Um, what is it?”

“I… have feelings,” Kei says, each word as unwieldy in his mouth as a stone. “For you.”

Yamaguchi’s brow furrows, which is not the reaction Kei had planned for. “What?”

Kei’s whole chest fills to flooding with those feelings he’s too scared to name. He looks at Yamaguchi’s perfect face and perfect hair and perfect shirt and perfect freckles, and his mind cuts out like an unplugged monitor.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he says.  

Yamaguchi stares at him for a very long time. After a few seconds, his jaw slackens, his lips parting incrementally—and his eyebrows stitch together. He doesn’t look swept off of his feet. He doesn’t even look flattered.

“Tsukishima, you don’t—” He stops, ducks his head, lifts it again. “I mean—you don’t even… _know_ me.”

Kei blinks, confused. “I do.”

“For, what, a day? Two?” Yamaguchi laughs stiltedly, touching a finger to his cheek. He turns away again until all Kei can see of him is his back, shadowed in the nighttime. “Listen, if this is some kind of joke—”

“It’s not a joke,” Kei assures him.

“I mean,” Yamaguchi goes on, a little sharper, as though Kei hadn’t spoken, “you don’t even know that I don’t actually like sweets all that much, and—”

“So no pancakes,” Kei mutters before he can restrict it to his mind instead of his mouth.

The room is still and silent for only a second after it’s out, but the tension in it fills Kei with dread.

Yamaguchi whirls on him. He looks torn between fury and alarm.

“ _What_?” he chokes out. “Are you—are you making a _list_ , or something?” He pales. “Is _that_ why you were asking all those questions…?”

Kei finds that he cannot lie, and so he just stands there, silent and ashamed. Yamaguchi understands in an instant. He’s pretty smart, Kei has learned, but smart in exceptional ways—insightful, empathetic. Smart in ways that Kei has yet to master. But it isn’t like he’s short on time.

“This whole thing.” Yamaguchi coughs on a strained, bitter laugh, lifting his fingers to his forehead. “You—it was a _game_.” His voice plunges. “I’m a game to you, huh.”

“No,” Kei hauls up the strength to say, because that, that is the truth, but he hears how it ends up sounding: elusive and uncertain. It isn’t like he plans for things to come out so poorly when he really means them. It’s just the defense his body has learned.

“Liar,” Yamaguchi murmurs. The smile on his face says so many things, and Kei doesn’t have to work to interpret any of them. _I knew it_ is the starkest. _I knew it. I knew it._

Kei wants more than anything to tell him how wrong he is, but he can scarcely fathom where to begin. And anyway, he probably doesn’t have the capacity or courage for such a sweeping, emotional gesture; he’s never been that person.

For the first time, looking at that fractured expression pulling Yamaguchi’s face apart, he wishes, with everything he has, that he could be. Just this once.

But he isn’t. Not yet.

“I’m leaving,” Yamaguchi croaks, voice breaking.

 _Don’t_ , Kei says in a world where he is braver. _Stay_. _Stay with me._

In this world, he stays where he is, paralyzed as Yamaguchi wipes his hurt-wrung face with his sleeve, storms for the door, pulls his coat on without buttoning it, and leaves him, alone, with the broken heater and the gathering storm and the radio, waiting.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I just think,” Hinata slurs, practically falling into Kei’s lap, “that you need to, like… be honest.”

Kei wrinkles his nose, already half-drunk. “Honest about _what_?”

Kageyama pulls Hinata back up by the collar of his puffer vest and keeps his hand awkwardly at his neck to prevent him from toppling over again. Kei scowls at the two of them, the breadth of his desperation descending on him with a sickening clarity.

“Your feelings,” Hinata says. He swings out an arm as if to lay a hand bracingly on Kei’s shoulder but just ends up whacking his wrist into the bar. “Ow.”

Kei wrinkles his nose again and takes the last gulp of his third… whatever the strong and saccharine cherry-red thing Hinata had ordered for him is. A syrupy heat seeps down to his ribs. His jaw feels heavy. The muffled, shapeless jazz music playing from a distant speaker is giving him a headache.

“Right,” he replies sarcastically. “Those.”

“You know what I mean, stupid four-eyed Stingyshima. You just have to tell him the _truth_. Yamaguchi can tell when you’re lying about stuff. For some reason he was born with Tsukishima Sense. I feel bad for him.” He sways toward Kageyama with a sour expression. “Imagine _understanding_ Tsukishima.”

“Gross,” Kageyama says flatly.

“Anyway,” Hinata says, and swivels back around, “just… stop lying… or whatever. You probably keep… lying… and that’s why Yamaguchi won’t date you.” He nods, once, staunch and sure, as if proud of himself for solving this labyrinthine problem. “Mm. Yep. That’s it.”

Unthinking, Kei pulls his phone from his pocket and scrolls through his contacts until he finds Yamaguchi’s name. His thumb pauses over the button it would take to call him. _Be honest, huh_.

There’s no simple way to compress the loneliness and wanting sitting heavy in his stomach into honesty. Even after all this, he’s still a coward.

He’s spent his whole life at peace with that. Why is this different?

 

 

* * *

 

 

“This,” Yamaguchi says, eyes shining, “is the best miso soup I’ve ever—”

“If this was your last day on earth,” Kei asks, “what would you do with it?”

The restaurant seems like a movie set now, as though if Kei pries a little of it back he will find an empty hallway littered with plaster and sawdust. The air feels artificial, the ambient sounds fabricated. Even the indirect light from the windows, which he once so admired for illuminating Yamaguchi’s face, looks harsh and unnatural. Yamaguchi blinks protuberantly at him, lowers his bowl, and swallows.

“Um,” he replies, clearly giving it deep and genuine thought, because of course he is, “I’m not sure. Spend it with my friends, I guess.”

Kei nods and looks down, toying with the corner of his napkin. “Friends. That’s a good answer.”

Yamaguchi leans to the side a little so that he’s back in Kei’s line of vision, worry wrinkling his face. He sets his chopsticks neatly down over his bowl.

“Is something wrong?” he asks.

Kei tries not to let out an empty laugh. Something? Just one thing?

He lets go of his napkin and lays his hand beside the other in his lap. He’s slumped down in his chair, knees askew, with a dull morning hunger curled in his stomach but no desire to eat. He can’t even remember what he’d said for the broadcast this morning. Something about long winters, and something about starting over, and something about tradition. The usual arrangement of niceties. Yamaguchi had told him that it was good.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks.

He sounds so tired. He feels like he hasn’t slept in a year. He looks Yamaguchi in the eye as he speaks, holding it out of selfish comfort rather than courage.

Yamaguchi doesn’t blink. Solemnly, he says, “Of course.”

Kei draws in a shuddering breath. The hunger feels a lot more like sickness, now. His palms are sweaty and cold. His chest is tight, as if shrinking bit by bit.

“This inn was built in 1850,” he begins.

Yamaguchi slackens, almost like he’s disappointed. “Oh.”

“The man who built it said that he wanted to build a place where travelers could feel at peace,” says Kei. “He traveled here from Tokyo and loved the mountains and the trees. He had never seen anything like them before. He lived here happily until he died. His daughter ran the inn after him, then her son, then his daughter. Then they sold it.”

Disappointment shifts to perplexion, slowly. “I-I see.”

“It takes fourteen minutes and twenty-six seconds to walk from here to the bookstore with just one copy left of _Snow Country_. If you make it before 13:20, you’ll be able to buy it before an old man looking for a gift for his daughter’s thirty-sixth birthday does. After that you can walk another three minutes and forty-two seconds to the dessert café that specializes in pancakes. You won’t like the pancakes; they’re too dense. You don’t like dense sweets, or most sweets, in fact. And anyway, there’s no point in going; they’ll have to close just after four because they’ll have run out of ingredients. One of the part-timers forgot to order flour.”

Yamaguchi isn’t saying anything. If Kei were to stop to breathe, he knows that would be the end of it. What was intended as a practiced monologue is now spilling out of him without direction or sense, the details overwhelming him. He can’t look at Yamaguchi anymore. He just can’t.

“In a little less than half an hour, it’s going to start to snow. It won’t seem like much at first, but by the late afternoon it’ll be closing down freeways. We won’t be able to make it back to Tokyo. But it’s fine, because you and Hinata and Kageyama all wanted to stay an extra day anyway. None of you bothered saying so because I was being such—such a jerk that you didn’t want to deal with it. But you’ll all go out for dinner and ginger sake tonight. You’ll have a great time. After five drinks, Hinata will tell Kageyama that he likes him.”

“Tsukishima.” It’s barely more than a whisper. There’s something imploring about it, as if Yamaguchi wants him to stop. But he can’t.

“Over there.” He points wearily over his shoulder without even turning his head. “That’s Sawamura Daichi. He prefers Daichi. He’s twenty-five years old, he likes the summer because the days are longer, and making him angry is just a really bad idea.” He moves his hand. “Sugawara Koushi. Twenty-five. Priest, like Daichi-san. His father was a priest, too, which is why he took on the business, even though he had doubts. He went to Kogakkan with Sawamura and Asahi because even though he didn’t really know what he wanted, he wanted to do it with them. Azumane Asahi’s outside looking at the birds, because it helps him relax. He’ll be back in about three minutes. He grows his hair long even though it makes people think he’s a delinquent because his parents made too much of a fuss about keeping it short or he’ll never be able to get a job. He turned 26 on New Year’s Day. He acts like Sugawara and Daichi-san look out for him but really it’s the other way around.”

“Whoa,” he hears Sugawara exclaim from the adjacent table.

Yamaguchi starts to shake his head. “That’s not—”

“In about three seconds a waiter’s going to drop a tray of dishes,” Kei says over him, and lifts his fingers to count down. “Three. Two. One—”

 _Crash!_ “Damn it, Koganegawa! How much crap do you have to break before you’re satisfied?!”

“S-Sorry, Futakuchi-senpai!”

“This is Koganegawa’s first job,” Kei says to Yamaguchi’s paling face. “He got it because he knows the chef’s son, Sakunami. He’s never met anyone taller than he is. That’s the sixth tray he’s dropped since he started working here, by the way.”

Yamaguchi’s starting to look a little frightened, now. “Okay, I think I get it—”

“The man who owns this inn is named Nekomata. He used to be the director of JNN. You know JNN. Kuroo Tetsurou and Kozume Kenma are some old protégés of his who came to visit so they can tell him about their Neighborhood Association volleyball team. He’s proud of them. Kuroo especially. Looking at the work they do, he can kind of feel like he left behind something worthwhile when he retired. Kuroo wants to confess to Kenma before they leave tomorrow. He’s been practicing for months, but he’ll probably chicken out. He always does.”

“Tsukishima,” Yamaguchi cuts him off, leaning so far back in his chair that going any further would undoubtedly topple it, “ _what is going on_?”

Here goes.

“I think,” Kei says, and then takes a long gulp of his tea, “I think I’m a god.”

Yamaguchi blinks at him—once, twice. His brow creases. He scoots forward a little, like he hadn’t quite heard him properly.

Then he narrows his eyes. “What?”

Kei wants to flip the table over, or maybe kick out the window, or even clobber himself over the head with the teapot. Instead, he scrubs a hand over his face, dislodging his glasses, and lets out a ragged, heavy sigh.

“Yamaguchi,” he rasps, “you’ve been having breakfast here with me for the past two hundred and eighteen days.”

The bell over the door jingles, and someone greets someone else joyfully, as they do every morning. Kei keeps his hand on his face, because suddenly the look on Yamaguchi’s is the absolute last thing he wants to see. Which is a strange turn of the tables.

He knows what to expect; he has taken inventory of the responses over dozens and dozens of times. _Have you been getting enough sleep? Is everything okay? Do you have a fever? Did something happen? Let’s get back to Tokyo so you can rest._ It’s what Yamaguchi always says, with those big brown eyes of his all wide and worried. Earnest, well-intentioned, but ultimately useless.

But what he hears this time is:

“Two hundred and eighteen, huh? Well, that’s specific.”

Kei lifts his head. Yamaguchi is still close to the table, arms crossed and elbows braced on the edge, staring at him critically. There isn’t the slightest hint of jest in his expression. His eyes are narrowed, his chin a little tilted, and he isn’t blinking. Kei has come to learn that this means he is thinking.

“Two hundred and eighteen…” he muses, then curls a finger around his chin, frowning pensively at his empty bowl. “Tsukishima…” His eyes rise back up, and meet Kei’s without faltering, and Kei’s next breath leaves him. In a shaking, disbelieving voice, as though wary of the answer, he asks, “What about me? Do you know me, too?”

“I know all about you,” Kei says.

So much more is contained in it than he’d planned. Affection, admiration, resentment, yearning. It aches with their weight. He wants to hide his face. He wants to hide everything.

“Your favorite color is green,” he says.

Yamaguchi’s eyes widen slowly.

“How…” He swallows. “How do you know that?”

“I asked you,” Kei says. “Sixty-five days ago. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.”

“And I just told you?”

“Yeah.”

“And you,” Yamaguchi flounders a little, “you remembered?”

Kei’s absent laugh moves quietly through his nose. He glances out the window, no longer able to stand Yamaguchi’s round face and the freckle over Yamaguchi’s lip that’s just a little darker than the rest and the way Yamaguchi is looking at him, like he’s just one sentimental notion away from believing him—like there isn’t a single part of him not suited for believing him.

He waits for the snow to start falling. Two minutes.

“Yeah,” he answers. “I remembered.”

More than Kei’s apparently prescient knowledge of his favorite color, it is this that prompts doubt to cloud Yamaguchi’s eyes. Kei knows that he should examine that, should map the contrition, but he can’t muster the strength. Not today. Tomorrow, maybe.

“Tsukishima, that’s—”

“Green like a forest,” Kei says, and under the table, he curls his right hand into a fist. “But not dark. Like…” He gestures with his left before he can stop himself, miming the visual, as Yamaguchi had, sitting in the dessert café sixty-five days ago, and as he has each day since, because Kei has not been able to stop himself from asking, every time, just to watch Yamaguchi’s face when he describes it. “Like sunlight coming down through the leaves. That green.”

Yamaguchi has gone silent. Kei rivets his eyes onto the pickled ginger in the dish between them, biting his lip when he feels his throat start to sorely fold in on itself.

More rushes out of him before he can categorize it, as thoughtless and unerring as the mountain wind blowing the storm over Nagano—the one that he should have predicted; the one that will make Yamaguchi so happy, because it will give them all a reason to stay.

“You like French fries, but only the soft and floppy kind. When you were a kid you got made fun of for your freckles, and one time your mom caught you trying to get rid of them with a pencil eraser. For Golden Week your family goes to Ueda, because your grandparents have a house there, and your favorite thing to do is wake up early so you can watch the morning glories open. You played volleyball in high school; you were a pinch server, but you only got to play in one match, and you lost. You’re a hard worker and a loyal friend. You’re always nice to people, and you apologize even when you don’t need to, and you’re a heavy sleeper, and when you stand in the snow, you look…”

It’s there, strangely enough, that he loses the strength to keep going, or maybe finds the strength to stop. The hushed, impulsive words taper into nothing.

Countless memories of Yamaguchi in the garden, Yamaguchi in the road, Yamaguchi in the park, shaking snow from his hair and laughing breathlessly, rush in and then fade. With great effort, he drags his gaze up to gauge Yamaguchi’s reaction.

He had expected fear, derision, discomfort—but the clarity in Yamaguchi’s expression is unmistakable. He leans back as if trying to see Kei more comprehensively, both hands hovering over the table’s edge, a pale shaft of the afternoon light catching in the ends of his hair when he moves into it.

“How are you doing this?” he asks hoarsely.

He almost sounds like he’s going to start crying. Kei tamps down the panic rising in him at the prospect.

“I told you,” Kei says. “I wake up every day, right here, right in Karuizawa. And it’s always February third. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But that’s not _possible_ ,” Yamaguchi says, gesturing wildly. “That’s—how is that even—”

Kei doesn’t fully hear him. He’s craned his neck to look out the window, following the first flecks of snow as they begin to tumble onto the frost-edged rooftops, bright and glistening in the morning sunlight. Right on schedule.

“Look,” he says, pulling out the pen from his pocket and taking Yamaguchi’s napkin. “In about twenty seconds, Hinata and Kageyama are going to come in here and tell us we have to go.” The napkin wrinkles slightly when he touches the nib to it, scratching out the words methodically: _Yamaguchi, Stingyshima; oi, we’d better get going if we don’t want to get snowed in_. “Just—don’t go with them, all right? You…” If his fingers tremble slightly around the pen, Yamaguchi is kind enough not to comment. Yamaguchi is always kind enough. “I’ll explain everything; just—please believe me.”

“Tsu—”

The bell over the door jingles just as Kei slides the napkin back to him. Yamaguchi’s fingers land on it carefully, as if on muscle memory.

“Yamaguchi! Stingyshima!” Hinata’s voice calls.

He and Kageyama both come to a halt at the corner of the table. There’s still snow in Hinata’s hair and a grin on his face, and Kageyama’s nose is still bright red. He’ll have a cold by the end of the day.

“Oi,” Hinata says, “we’d better get going if we don’t want to get snowed in.”

Yamaguchi is not looking at him. Yamaguchi is looking at the note. His mouth silently moves around the shapes of the words as Hinata says them, eerily synchronized. When he reaches the end, his lips fold into a line and his eyebrows twitch faintly toward each other. Kei is overcome by the want to cross the table and take his face firmly in his hands, to shock away that devastated expression.

“Hello?” Hinata says loudly, hunching over to poke Yamaguchi in the cheek. “Producer-sama, did you hear me?”

Kageyama shuffles over to Kei’s side and points at his unfinished bowl of rice. “Are you gonna eat that?”

Kei wrinkles his nose and silently shoves the bowl toward him. Kageyama gratefully swipes it up along with Kei’s chopsticks and starts to scarf the contents while still standing, like an animal.

“Um,” Yamaguchi says, breaking his focus away from the note and glancing distractedly at Hinata, then at Kageyama. “Um,” he says again.

Kei starts jiggling his leg unconsciously. _Please_.

Yamaguchi remains motionless for a moment more. And then he folds up the napkin, neatly and carefully, before tucking it into his pocket.

He looks up at Hinata and says, with an apologetic smile, “Actually.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“So,” Yamaguchi says with a brisk sigh, walking in time with Kei down the snow-edged road, “you’re stuck in a time loop.”

Kei glances over his nose at him, mouth twisting. “Don’t say it so…”

“So what?”

“ _Casually_ ,” Kei finishes with a grimace.

Yamaguchi has the nerve to giggle. It’s got a more mischievous edge to it than Kei’s heard before. Impish. His heart does a backflip.

“Well, how else should I say it?” he teases Kei, jabbing him lightly in the side and apparently relishing in his squirming. “You don’t want me yelling it to the whole town, do you?”

Kei makes a pained face. “Please don’t.”

Yamaguchi splutters out another laugh, throwing his head back.

“I’m glad _you’re_ enjoying yourself,” Kei says.

“I am,” Yamaguchi says cheerily. “You’re normally so… you know. Serious? It’s nice to see a different side of you.”

“The suffering side, you mean.”

“The suffering side,” Yamaguchi replies, and beams. That horrible expression renders Kei physically incapable of staying annoyed, although he tries.

Yamaguchi lifts both of his arms, swinging them in the air as he walks. “So? What do you want to do?”

Kei raises his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“Well, if I’m going to be your shadow until things switch back again, we might as well do something to pass the time,” Yamaguchi says.

“Yamaguchi,” Kei says, “is this a date?”

Yamaguchi doesn’t turn around, so Kei can’t calculate a truth from his expression. He walks a little more slowly, his arms lowering to his sides again, and tips his head back, as though he and the sky share a secret.

He hums pensively, and even though Kei knows it’s for show, his heart is small and helpless in his throat, blocking his breath. Then Yamaguchi turns his head to smile shyly at Kei over his shoulder, reaching up to pull some hair back over his forehead, and says briskly, “Yep.”

Kei’s next shivering breath clouds in front of his suddenly open mouth. Yamaguchi’s eyes follow it, briefly glazing over, before he seems to come back to himself and whips his head back around, walking ahead a little more hurriedly.

Kei continues to follow him in a sort of enchanted daze. They wander through the usual places: the bookstore Yamaguchi likes, the café with the good hot chocolate, the restaurant with the view of the frozen river. Yamaguchi buys him a t-rex figurine from a toy store. They get ramen for dinner. Kei lets Yamaguchi steal his pork belly.

All the while, Yamaguchi asks him about what he’s learned, and Kei can see no reason not to tell him. The tacit permission to address all of it so conversationally is liberating, and not once does Yamaguchi seem to doubt or mock him, reacting in all the right ways, with amusement and amazement, sympathy and sobriety. And Kei tells him… _everything_ , until his throat is sore, until his voice stops sounding like his own.

Yamaguchi has always been easy to talk to, but this is different. Long after dark, in the garden of the inn, sitting next to him on a stone bench under the hidden stars, Kei finishes the story about him deriding Yamaguchi’s volleyball years, the wound it had opened, the silent bus ride back through the snow, when they’d taken seats a row apart.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, because he never got the chance to.

Yamaguchi lets out a full-bodied laugh. “I really got that mad?”

“It wasn’t _funny_ , Yamaguchi.”

“Not for you, maybe.” Yamaguchi snickers, but then waves a hand apologetically. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Sorry for yelling at you in a parallel universe.”

“I deserved it,” Kei mutters, craning his neck back. He finds the lonely moon, glowing dully just beyond the northern roof.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Yamaguchi tells him. “We all mess up sometimes.” His smile gets a little more distant. “Anyway, it means a lot to hear you apologize. Even if I don’t remember what it was like to want you to.”

The edges of Kei’s lips quirk faintly. “You’re welcome,” he says, more softly than he intends.

Yamaguchi’s eyes widen infinitesimally and a flush creeps up his cheeks. Their faces are closer than Kei had realized, close enough that he finds himself staring at Yamaguchi’s short, dense eyelashes. If he were just to let the night breeze push him, just a little bit—

“Tsukishima,” Yamaguchi murmurs, heavy-lidded and comprehending.

This, Kei hadn’t planned: Yamaguchi, both hands still on the bench, closing his eyes and tilting his head and pressing a kiss to his mouth. It’s brief, light, unsure; dry lips brushing against Kei’s with little more weight than the rim of a cup, but all of Kei’s blood rushes to life at the touch, thrumming in his ears like a second heartbeat.

“You can call me Tsukki,” he blurts out a second after Yamaguchi inches away, and he immediately wants to bury himself in the snowdrift and freeze to death.

Yamaguchi blinks owlishly at him. “Tsukki?” he parrots, like it’s a foreign word.

No, the snowdrift would take too long. And anyway, Kei’s blushing so hard that he’d probably just melt it. “What you said in, um, the van. When you—I mean—”

“Oh!” Yamaguchi lifts one finger, pointing at Kei’s face. “Right, that!” His hand falters, starting to inch back down. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sorry,” Kei fumbles out. “I just, um—” _I’ve wanted to kiss you every single day_. “Nothing. Forget I said anything.”

“Tsukki,” Yamaguchi says, testing it out. His gaze drifts back to Kei’s mouth, softening. “I don’t care what Hinata says. It suits you.”

Kei nods, gazing back.

A sudden wind gusts through the courtyard and Yamaguchi shivers, rubbing his arms and hissing, “Cold!”

“Do you want to go inside?” Kei asks.

“Yes please,” Yamaguchi answers through chattering teeth.

Kei follows him to the door, their footsteps crunching faintly in the bed of snow on the pathway, with tingling lips and a restless heart. It escapes his notice that they’re walking down the hallway to Yamaguchi’s room, and not Kei’s, until they’re standing in front of it and Yamaguchi is rummaging through his pockets for the key.

“Huh?” Kei says brilliantly.

Yamaguchi blinks at him, completely innocent, and turns the key in the lock. “ _My_ heater isn’t broken.”

 _Oh_ , Kei thinks. “Oh,” he says.

Yamaguchi turns his face away, but Kei still catches the stifled smirk on it. He pushes open the door and holds it with one hand. “After you, Tsukki.”

All of Kei’s insides do an impressive somersault. He nods rigidly, mumbles, “thank you,” and sidles inside.

There is indeed a distinct absence of a kotatsu, although it looks like Yamaguchi laid a quilt over the table to make do. It’s dark blue, patterned with cranes. There’s a painting of the kanji for _inner peace_ hanging on the wall, and a retro-looking television on four legs in the corner. The room is comfortably toasty; the orange glow of the humming, perfectly functional floor heater near the sliding door fills Kei with jealousy.

His eyes catch on Yamaguchi’s suitcase, flush against the cabinet—it’s the same model as his, but green. He’d never noticed before.

“Nice suitcase,” he says, like a true romantic, over the soft rustle of Yamaguchi taking off his coat.

“Thanks!” Yamaguchi replies cheerfully, as if accepting a truly touching compliment, instead of a product of Kei’s panic button being slammed one too many times today.

 _Nice suitcase_. Really? _Really?_

“One second while I get the futon!” Yamaguchi hurries into a nook adjacent to the bathroom before Kei can fully process the meaning. By the time he does, Yamaguchi has reappeared with a futon slung over one arm and two pillows tucked under the other.

“Yamaguchi,” he says, strangled, as Yamaguchi crouches down and unrolls the futon.

Yamaguchi tilts his head. “What’s up?”

Powerless to conjure something as complicated as a word, Kei gestures to the pillows. “Are you—I mean—”

“Oh!” Yamaguchi squeaks, flinging his hands up and waving them frantically. “D-Don’t get the wrong idea, Tsukki; I just—um—well, if you’re going to reset at midnight, I thought maybe I could stay up with you and… see what happens? Maybe it’ll help!”

Kei forces his elevated pulse to slow. The wrong idea, huh? What would have been the _right_ idea?

“I mean,” Yamaguchi adds feebly, “it’s… a big futon…”

It isn’t at all a big futon. It’s wide enough for maybe one person, if that person was Hinata. Kei takes his glasses off to clean the perfectly clean lenses on the hem of his sweater, just to give himself something to do that isn’t staring at the not-big futon and thinking about lying next to Yamaguchi on it.

“I-It’s not like I’m the only thing that changes,” he says in his trustiest monotone. “The opposite, actually. I’m the same, and everything _else_ starts over.”

“You don’t know that,” Yamaguchi says. “I mean, maybe I’ll just continue to exist in this timeline, or universe or whatever, and I’ll be able to figure out what happened to you, because I’ll have seen it, and I can come rescue you!”

“How heroic.”

Yamaguchi clenches one fist. “We’ll figure it out, Tsukki. Together.”

Kei dearly hopes that the room is dim enough to keep his blush from being obvious. Yamaguchi says things like this—things that Kei can scarcely fathom feeling, let alone voicing—with such ease, as though they are old and loyal friends. Kei had used the word _heroic_ with a note of sarcasm, but suddenly it’s the most suitable thing to describe the incandescent quality to Yamaguchi’s stare, the wholly trusting affection that sweeps through Kei’s whole body. _That’s right_ , is all he can think as Yamaguchi gazes up at him, fingers curled into the fabric of the unfurled quilt. _We will_.

“Okay,” he answers, and puts his glasses back on.

The futon smells fresher than Kei’s, as though dried by sunlight and a breeze rather than a machine. It’s softer, too, or maybe it just feels that way with Yamaguchi lying across from him, hands tucked against his chest, holding his breath so as not to disrupt the negligible space between their bodies. Kei’s heart feels like it’s pressed against the roof of his mouth.

“Are you warm enough?” Yamaguchi asks, voice cracking.

“Yeah,” Kei says.

Yamaguchi shifts slightly under the covers, his shoulder rising briefly below the fabric like a fish’s back in water, expression conflicted.

“What’s wrong?”

Kei frowns. “Huh?”

“You seem…” Yamaguchi says, and his eyes dart down. “I don’t know, I guess. Um… sorry.”

Hinata’s voice bobs unwelcomely to the surface of Kei’s consciousness. _Just stop lying_.

“Yamaguchi, you’ll forget,” he mumbles. “Everything we did today, everything I said—I’m going to wake up tomorrow in my room, and you’ll be in here getting ready to shoot at the shrine. That’s how it always goes.”

“I won’t,” Yamaguchi says, shaking his head once. He holds Kei’s gaze. The ember-like glow of the heater has made a home in his eyes, constant and faithful and alive. “I’ll be right here. I promise.”

He says it so easily and confidently that, against all logic and hope, Kei almost believes him, believes that Yamaguchi might be the one person with the power to defy this construct of the gods’ making. This must be what heroes in novels mean when they talk of being swept off their feet—so bewildered and so reassured that they sink into a pair of waiting arms without the thought of gravity.

Yamaguchi reaches haltingly across the quilt and ghosts his fingers over the back of Kei’s hand, soliciting permission. Kei turns his palm out, and Yamaguchi’s thumb settles on it to chart the lines. Kei shivers at the lightness of his touch.

“Right here,” Yamaguchi repeats, softer this time, and not even the low light can conceal the flush on his face after he says it.

An unexpectedly affectionate smile tugs at Kei’s cheek. So corny. He closes his fingers around Yamaguchi’s, reveling in their warmth. Yamaguchi squeezes his hand, wriggling around under the blanket to get comfortable, and gazes at Kei across the few inches of futon between them, eyes half-lidded, lips quirked faintly into a smile.

Kei feels kind of sleepy, suddenly, in a languid, contented way that he hasn’t in quite some time. Yamaguchi yawns, covering his mouth with one hand, and nuzzles his cheek deeper into his pillow with a hum.

After a few minutes, Kei murmurs his name, but Yamaguchi doesn’t stir. His breathing is quiet and even, making the quilt rise and fall intermittently.

Kei inhales, already half-asleep himself, and speaks before his irrelevant fear can obstruct him.

“Yamaguchi…” he mumbles. “I like hanging out with you. I think you’re the nicest, bravest person I’ve ever met. If I… could… sleep with you every night like this… I think I could be happy… forever.”

Yamaguchi’s brow pinches infinitesimally, and he lifts his head, eyes cracking dazedly open. He’s barely awake, Kei can tell, but he still looks right at him, fingers tightening in his hand.

“Did you say something…?” he murmurs.

Kei shakes his head. “No. Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

Yamaguchi looks like, were he awake, he might not believe him. But like this, with so much of him still lingering in a faraway dream, he nods slowly, eyes drifting shut again, and his grip around Kei’s hand loosens until he isn’t holding it anymore.

Kei watches him for only a moment. He thinks about kissing him, thinks about running his hand up under his shirt, thinks about asking him to stay instead of waiting for him to offer.

He slips his hand out of Yamaguchi’s slowly and carefully so as not to wake him, but doesn’t roll away. He keeps his eyes on him for as long as he can, committing his pose and the shadows on his face to memory. But there is something about this, something about the vestiges of the warmth from Yamaguchi’s body filling the space between them, that’s making him feel drowsy and untroubled and calm, as though this moment is impregnable.

Cautiously, he eases his fingers under Yamaguchi’s again. Yamaguchi’s tighten incrementally around his, but he doesn’t wake. And Kei closes his eyes.

He drifts to sleep still facing Yamaguchi, both of them curled toward each other, hand in hand.

He dreams about ginkgo trees in summer, and infinite afternoons, and the smell of grass—and Yamaguchi’s body under his body, his hands on the planes of Yamaguchi’s back, Yamaguchi _to you yes my love to you_ laughing softly into his chest and the radio _I cried without going home_ like nothing has changed _that season is now right in front of you_ like Tokyo has never seen snow _stay with me_ —

“Good morning, Karuizawa! Don’t rush to get out of bed, now, because it’s _cold_ out there this morning—”

“It’s cold out there every morning!”

Kei’s eyes snap open and he sits bolt upright, fingers closing into a fist around empty air. A sliver of the morning light cuts through the blinds and draws a pale line across the cold comforter beside him.

“Today is February 3rd, and you know what that means—”

Kei looks down at his hand. His fingers are stiff from the chill that the broken heater couldn’t chase out. Slowly, rigidly, he closes them; his muscles, weak from sleep, can barely clench them into a fist.

There is the line that Yamaguchi had traced; there is the spot where his touch had lingered, a question. There is Kei’s wrist, where Yamaguchi’s thumb had halted right over his pulse. There is the pillow, where Yamaguchi had promised that he would stay. There is the clear white earth outside the sill, the clustered fir boughs, the tentative call of the spring’s first bush warblers.

The same as always.

Kei rolls away, pulling the comforter over his head and breathing shallowly in the dimness. He can see no point in getting up. He hears the radio announcement three more times, staying curled and still on the tatami floor, before he does.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Good morning, Tsukishima!” Yamaguchi chirps, hands tucked under his legs and a cheery smile on his face, when Kei sinks into his chair at breakfast.

“Grrfmrrfnrrf,” Hinata adds.

Kei stares into Yamaguchi’s eyes for too long. There’s a burning tightness in his throat through which he can hardly see fit to breathe. A crease appears between Yamaguchi’s eyebrows the longer Kei goes without speaking, but still Kei’s eyes rove over each inch of his face, all of the parts he should have kissed in the windy garden, the slope of his freckled cheek where the orange light had settled, his short eyelashes, the dent of an old scar on his chin.

“Hey… Yamaguchi…” He clears his throat to shake some substance back into his voice. “What’s your favorite color?”

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the blustery routine of Karuizawa, that tiny town among the snow-capped mountains and the silent cedars, Kei goes on living. (He tries the alternative only once, with little success.) In a way, it’s kind of what a normal life would be like: he wakes up, eats breakfast, goes to work, comes back, reads a book or watches TV or goes for a walk or plays volleyball, takes a long bath, and goes to bed. Rinse, repeat. He introduces variety when he needs to and enjoys the routine when he wants to.

He wonders, idly, in a way that’s already kind of self-defeating, if he’ll ever get over Yamaguchi. Probably, right? Eventually. Starting from square one’s got to lose its charm sooner or later.

“Oi, you! Glasses! Tsukishima Kei-kun!”

“Good morning, Kuroo-san,” Kei says, coming to a stop on the sidewalk. Kuroo jogs up to him, coat flapping with the motion, and gives him the usual lazy grin when he’s close enough.

Almost a month, now, since Yamaguchi’s unkept promise. Kei muses on what he’ll get for dinner tonight. Maybe he’ll finally take Hinata and Kageyama up on their offer to get hot ginger sake at the izakaya, although the likelihood that that would involve having to be near Yamaguchi is fairly high, and thus the prospect is less than amenable.

“Ah, you remember my name!” Kuroo exclaims. “What an honor.”

“Are you headed to Kumanokotai?”

Kuroo waves a hand. “No, no. It’s the same old stuff every year; JNN doesn’t need that. Although I guess you guys at TV Asahi always did prefer the simple approach.” Kei scowls. “It was a joke, a joke! Anyway—Kenma and I are going to film some landscapes for a station special on the countryside in winter. Really boring stuff, but Kenma’s into it. I was just heading to meet him.”

“Mm,” Kei says.  

“What about you? You’ve got a clear-eyed look about you, Tsukishima. Normally you’re so gloomy!” He claps Kei on the back. “You know, it’s funny I should run into you. Our old director owns the inn back on the hill—that’s where you’re staying, right? Well, he mentioned that you used to play volleyball in junior high, and—”

“Yes, I’ll join your team,” Kei says.  

“Hah?” Kuroo leaps back. “Really? Just like that?!”

A lot of things have gotten old for Kei these days, but flabbergasting Kuroo is not one of them.

“Sure,” he says. “I don’t live in Nerima, but I’m sure that not being a part of the neighborhood won’t cause any issues with my being accepted into the Neighborhood Association.” He bows cheerfully. “If you’ll excuse me…”

“Tsukishima, if you’ve been possessed, you can tell me!” Kuroo calls after him. “W-Wait a minute, how the hell do you know where I live?!”

Kei rounds the corner and stuffs his hands into his pockets, breathing slowly out through his mouth just to watch it fog up. When he reaches Kumanokotai, he makes his way toward the spot where the others will be without having to look. Yamaguchi greets him brightly, pleased that he’s shown up on time. Hinata insists on fixing his hair, because apparently there’s something wrong with it. Kageyama fiddles grumpily with the camera like usual, wearing his “thinking about onigiri” expression.

“Tsukishima, come on, clap a little,” Yamaguchi implores him with a nudge after the oni performance has ended and Kei has shaken the stray beans from the folds of his coat. And Kei rolls his eyes, but does.

“All right, Tsukishima, you’re up!” Hinata crows from behind the camera. “Don’t ruin the moment!”

Kei snatches the microphone churlishly from Yamaguchi’s hand. “I _won’t_.”

“Tsukishima, fight-o,” Yamaguchi chants in a whisper, and when Kei whirls on him he’s got a placid, innocent smile tacked on, hands tucked behind his back.

“K-Kageyama, did you see that?” Hinata hisses.

“Huh? See what?”

“I think they just _flirted_?”

“Yamaguchi? And _Tsukishima_? Are you hallucinating, dumbass? Roll the camera!”

“But—”

“Roll it!” Kageyama barks, and gestures for Kei to start.

“Tsukishima Kei in Karuizawa, on the eve of the first day of spring. The oni have just been driven away from Kumanokotai for another year, and in their wake we are left with the promise of good luck and happiness until winter returns again. Standing in this great courtyard among residents and tourists alike, I am reminded again of the poet Mibu no Tadamine, who wrote, ‘ _In the fields of Kasuga, / the fallen snow is parting, / pushed aside / by new shoots._ ’ Spring may be a little late this year, but it will come. All that remains is to celebrate another year,” and, helplessly, his eyes drift over the crowd to Yamaguchi’s proudly beaming face, “together. Thank you.”

On the way back down the hill, as Yamaguchi and Kageyama’s conversation about the superior fast food item fades gradually into ambient noise, Kei’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He tugs it out, steps slowing to an amble, surrounded by the smell of snow and smoke and conifer and strangely, serenely content.

 _from: Ennoshita Chikara_  
_That was good, Tsukishima._

 _from: Ennoshita Chikara_  
_And Narita didn’t even have to hold up a sign._

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Tsukishimaaaaaaa.”

“Yes?”

“ _Tsukishiiiiimaaaaaaa_.”

“Yes?”

“ _Tsuuuuuuukiiiiiishiiiimaaaaaa_.”

“Yes?”

Hinata flops over until one of his legs is bent out and his head is heavy on Kei’s shoulder and lets out a horrible peal of drunken gremlin laughter. Kei doesn’t shove him off, reaching across the table for the bottle of ginger sake and refilling Hinata’s empty cup.

This is the first time he’s gone to the izakaya, and in a way he wishes he’d done it sooner. The place is crowded, but not in a way that annoys him, which is miraculous. He, Hinata, Kageyama, and Yamaguchi are squeezed into a corner table, celebrating the day’s work.

“You _came_ ,” Hinata cries for the tenth time since Kei had accepted his offhanded invitation. His body weight sags against Kei’s arm, slowly cutting off the circulation. “Soft Tsukishima. _Comfy_ Tsukishima.”

Across the table, seated in a haphazard seiza beside Yamaguchi, Kageyama looks like he’s ready to lunge forward and punt Kei directly out the window. Kei sets the bottle back down and smirks at him, just for the pleasure of goading him, and it works.

“Sit up, you dumbass!” Kageyama snaps, pounding a fist on the table and rattling the empty yakitori plates. “Have you lost your mind? This is _Tsukishima_!”

“Why do _you_ care?” Hinata whines.

“I just—” Kageyama’s features pinch unattractively and he explodes, “I just _do_ , okay?”

Hinata rolls his head over, cheek squished into the fold of Kei’s sweater sleeve, and evaluates Kageyama with a renewed focus. Kageyama’s hands are crammed into his lap, and his crumpled mouth and splotchy cheeks are still visible even though he ducks his head.

Suddenly, Hinata pushes himself up into standing, swaying in place for a moment before he settles. Kageyama glares up at him, perplexed, as he opens and closes his mouth, the corners of it turning down into a nervous grimace.

“Hinata,” Yamaguchi says worriedly, “I’m sure he wasn’t trying to be—”

“Kageyama,” Hinata yells, eyes shut tight, face bright red and furiously wrinkled, “ _I like you_!”

Kei idly takes a sip of his sake. Kageyama gawks at Hinata as though he is seeing the whole of him for the first time, countless impossible facets gleaming at him all at once. The simplicity of it is laughable.

Kei glances surreptitiously at Yamaguchi to gauge his response, but not for the first time, he finds that Yamaguchi is already looking at him. He plays it cool, managing not to choke on the sake, even as he thinks he catches something in Yamaguchi’s earth-brown eyes that fills him with wanting and confusion. Something like a decision.

“B-Back me up, Tsukishima!” Hinata hisses, and kicks him. Sake splashes into Kei’s face and dribbles down his chin.

“What do you need _Tsukishima_ for?” Kageyama barks, and then he surges to his feet, too, facing down Hinata with his arms ramrod straight and his hands clenched into fists. “You think I can’t say I like you back? _Hah_?!”

Hinata sticks out his tongue, entirely too drunk to recognize what Kageyama’s just said, and then flops contentedly against Kei’s arm again, dead asleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Yamaguchi tries to insist on helping, but Kei piggy-backs Hinata all the way back to the hotel, listening to Hinata’s tiny snores and sleep-mumbling as he hangs limply on Kei like a sloth. Kageyama doesn’t look jealous, for once, instead following close to the two of them on Kei’s left, deep in thought, not speaking.

Kei passes Hinata off to him when they reach the lobby, and Kageyama slings one of Hinata’s arms across his shoulders, holding it by the wrist as he leads Hinata in a stumbling shuffle down the hallway. Kei waits until they’re out of sight just in case they break the decorative urn against the wall, but Kageyama manages to steer Hinata out of the way just in time.

He turns to Yamaguchi. “What time is it?”

Yamaguchi jumps, fumbling for his phone. “Um… 22:30?”

Kei grimaces. “Late.”

“Are you going to bed?” Yamaguchi asks.

There’s something in his voice that Kei can’t identify. Kei shrugs rather than pursue it, although a familiar feeling grips him once again: that there is something he is supposed to say.

“Probably,” he says. “I’ll just stay up and read. What about you?”

“Oh.” Yamaguchi sounds dejected. His posture wilts. “P-Probably go to bed, too…”

Kei softens without thinking to guard it, looking at Yamaguchi. He doesn’t think he’s ever wanted so badly for a night in Karuizawa to last. Though he’d given up on the notion long ago, he finds himself aching to make Yamaguchi understand, in that vast, comprehensive way that he never truly can or will.

There can’t be more than a foot of space between them in the empty lobby. It would be so easy to cross, Kei thinks—the easiest thing he’s ever done, if only it felt like it would change something. But he’s learned better.

“Night, then,” he says. “Thanks for inviting me tonight.”

Yamaguchi’s eyes flit minutely over his face with a muted longing. There is still some snow in his hair, flecks dotting the ends and vanishing in the pervasive, underlying warmth. They’ll all be gone before long, with no sign to indicate that they’d ever been there at all. Yamaguchi won’t even think of how close they had been, or of how they had felt, or of how long they had lasted. He’ll fall asleep under a blue quilt printed with cranes, and then…

“Good night, Tsukishima,” Yamaguchi mumbles, and lingers for only a moment longer before making his way across the lobby in the opposite direction, his footsteps silent on the hardwood floor.

Kei watches him go—this time, too, until he is out of sight.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Kei goes back to his room alone and makes it through two pages of the _Hyakunin Isshu_ (third read) before wanting to pitch it out the window. He glances at the alarm clock: 12:03. He ought to just go to sleep and let it come, but something stubborn and resentful in him wants to wait it out tonight, to make time take him back on his own terms.

He decides that he’ll go for hot ginger sake with Hinata and Kageyama and Yamaguchi tomorrow, too, and the day after, and the day after that. If there’s one thing that this whole situation has taught him, it’s that there’s no real sense in depriving himself of the things and people that make him happy, if he can help it.

He scans the words on the page without absorbing them. _In my cold bed, drawing close my folded quilt, I sleep alone, while all through the frosty night, I hear a cricket’s lonely sound_.

“Damn it,” he mutters aloud, and drops the book onto his face.

Out of the quiet, two knocks sound at the door, so soft and hesitant that at first Kei thinks they must be for the room across the hall. He lies still, and after a moment hears them again, firmer this time.

He tucks his bookmark between the pages and sets the book on the floor, clambering to his feet with a call of, “Yes, yes.”

When he swings the door open, his stomach drops to his knees.

“Ah,” he says, blinking.

“Hello,” Yamaguchi blurts out. His voice cracks. His face and neck are flushed, and his hair is combed back from his forehead, and he’s breathing a little heavily, like he’d run here. Kei watches his body move with it, in and out, under the long brown sweater and the dinosaur shirt.

“Hello,” he miraculously manages to reply.

Yamaguchi pants, swallows. He stands up a little straighter. Despite his slightly disheveled appearance, there’s a ferocious clarity in his gaze that makes Kei’s stomach shudder.

“Can I come in?” he asks.

Kei blinks at him some more, then hesitantly steps aside, holding the door open. Yamaguchi bows curtly and strides past him with his arms ramrod straight at his sides. He’s wearing a pair of the inn’s complimentary cherry blossom slippers.

Kei closes the door with the knob still turned so as not to make any noise. Yamaguchi is facing him when he looks up, the set of his mouth hard and determined. It’s kind of cute. But then again, it’s Yamaguchi.

“I need to tell you something,” Yamaguchi says, gravely serious, “and I don’t want you to say anything until I’m done. Okay?”

Kei blinks at him for a moment, and then slowly nods. Yamaguchi nods back, wringing his hands, and starts to pace in a narrow circle. Just when Kei can’t take it any longer, he stops, looking him resolutely in the eye, his silhouette dreamlike in the half-light of the dark room. His deep breath is unsteady.

“Do you know the rest of the poem?” he asks. There’s an intensity to it that Kei hadn’t expected, such that it feels like an order rather than a question.

“What?” Kei says intelligently.

“The rest of the poem,” Yamaguchi says. “Do you know it?”

Kei shakes his head.

Yamaguchi breathes in again, a little less shaky this time, and recites: “‘ _In the fields of Kasuga, / the fallen snow is parting, / pushed aside / by new shoots, as briefly / as I caught sight of you._ ’”

So that’s what Yamaguchi sounds like reading poetry. “Right,” Kei says, keeping his voice even.  

Yamaguchi nods several times, as if to himself, and starts to pace again. “Right. I… I just—what I wanted to say was—I wanted to—” He stops, shoulders slumping. “Well. I don’t know.”

Kei watches him for a moment longer before starting to feel bad for making him stand.

“So… is it okay if I talk?”

“Huh? Oh,” Yamaguchi says glumly. “Sure.”

Only half-thinking, Kei points to the futon and asks, “Would it be easier to talk lying down?”

“H-Huh?!” Yamaguchi squawks. “Huh? _Huh_?”

“It’s a big futon,” Kei says.

Yamaguchi’s face is the most shocking shade of red that Kei has ever seen—but after a strained pause, he swallows, stands up a little straighter, and gives a hard nod.

They wind up lying side-by-side on their backs, listening to the wind blow and staring at the ceiling. Yamaguchi’s hands are linked at his stomach, thumbs fidgeting. He smells like a yuzu bath.

“Did you have fun?” he asks. “Here, I mean.”

Kei thinks for a long moment. “Yeah. I did.”

Happiness flits across Yamaguchi’s face. “I’m glad.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah!” Yamaguchi nods, rustling on the pillowcase. “You and Hinata and Kageyama are great. You’re all really talented.”

“Talent isn’t everything,” Kei says gently, rolling his head to look at Yamaguchi more fully.

“Well, no,” Yamaguchi concedes with a sheepish laugh, “but still… it’s hard not to get jealous.”

“Jealous of Hinata and Kageyama,” Kei says, and pretends to give it some thought. “That’s true. I’m sure your life would be improved by the total eradication of all brainpower.”

Yamaguchi splutters on a laugh, and as Kei revels in his success, Yamaguchi elbows him in the arm. “Be serious for a second. I just mean…”

When Kei looks over at him again, whatever emotion lies beneath his expression is difficult to intuit. His eyelashes are a little longer at the edges than they are in the middle, and they hang low and thoughtful over his eyes. An elusive smile holds up the left corner of his mouth. He draws in a quiet breath through his nose.

“What you did today,” he says, “and what you said for the broadcast, it was—it was really nice. I don’t know why, but I feel like it really meant something. I’m happy that I got to be here with you.” He colors, stammering, “A-And Hinata and Kageyama.”

Kei, his stomach a braided rope, rolls closer to Yamaguchi and closes his fingers around his left hand, guiding it down to rest on the futon in the space between them. Yamaguchi watches, his mouth agape, before his eyes rise to Kei’s face, searching.

Kei weaves their fingers loosely together and says, with everything in him, “I’m happy, too.”

Yamaguchi seems to consider something before propping himself up on his elbow. The comforter rustles beneath his body when he does. He doesn’t pull his hand away.

Kei looks up at him questioningly, watching as he draws in a faint breath, swallows, and exhales through his nose. His features settle into an expression of resolve.

Kei frowns. “Yama—”

Yamaguchi leans down to him slowly. He pauses for an instant halfway, as if reevaluating the trajectory, and his breath warms Kei’s face. He tightens his grip on Kei’s hand, just barely, and closes his eyes. Kei has only a moment to watch a beam of moonlight through the blinds gild his eyelashes.

Yamaguchi’s mouth is as warm as his hands. It’s warmer than Kei could have possibly imagined. It fits against his own seamlessly, and Yamaguchi lets out a quiet noise when it does—and suddenly the winter chill is gone.

Kei’s eyes fall closed, too, without much thought at all.

He trails his free hand up Yamaguchi’s arm, stopping at his neck, fingers finding their way into the places where the ends of his hair curl a little. Yamaguchi makes a noise at that touch, too, shifting closer, his palm settling on Kei’s cheek, holding him in place.

It’s so quiet, Kei thinks as Yamaguchi eases him onto his back. The only things he can hear are the sound of Yamaguchi’s breathing as it mingles with his own and the faint and ceaseless murmur of snow falling beyond the walls, like brown noise, dense and comforting.

Does anything else even matter, besides this? Does anything else even exist? Had he just imagined a world beyond the sensation of Yamaguchi’s fingers at his jaw this entire time? It wouldn’t surprise him.

Yamaguchi starts to draw away, about to say something, but Kei catches him before he can, the word vanishing between them. Now he holds Yamaguchi’s head in place, gripping the hair at the nape of his neck, and Yamaguchi is practically half on top of him, chest on his chest, knee slung haphazardly over his legs. He isn’t heavy, or anything, but—

“Tsukishima,” Yamaguchi whispers. Kei’s short-circuiting brain stumbles the few steps forward that it needs to to realize that he is no longer kissing him.

 _Why not_ , Kei thinks grumpily, and belatedly opens his eyes to blink up at Yamaguchi, whose flushed face is directly over his. His open lips are rosy and bright. He looks both captivated and utterly terrified.

“Yes?” Kei murmurs, unable to tear his attentions away from Yamaguchi’s mouth. He combs his fingers up through his hair and then back down, which makes Yamaguchi’s eyelids flutter. Kei decides that he will make good use of that gesture.

“We,” Yamaguchi says, and then swallows thickly. “Can I. Stay here? Just for a while.”

“Yes,” Kei says without hesitation. He starts to tug Yamaguchi down again, but Yamaguchi braces himself with his palm flat on the mat next to Kei’s head.

“I really…” Yamaguchi bites his lip, gaze darting aside. “I just mean…”

Yamaguchi does not seem sure of what he means. Kei, however, thinks that he might understand.

“Stay,” Kei tells him, as frankly and sincerely as he has maybe ever told anyone anything. “I want you to. I like you, Yamaguchi.”

Yamaguchi blinks down at him for a moment without even drawing a breath, eyes searching Kei’s face for some sign of insincerity.

“I do,” Kei says, thinking of just how much he has come to like Yamaguchi in the endless days he stopped counting long ago, thinking of all that he has discovered and of how thoroughly he has fallen for it—every miraculous, impossible thing.

Yamaguchi’s arms buckle a little when he blurts out an incredulous laugh. He drops his forehead against Kei’s and keeps it there, scrunching his whole face around a grin. He’s warm. He’s so warm.  

“I think I like you, too,” he whispers.

Kei feels weightless. His next breath shivers in his chest.

He reaches for Yamaguchi’s cheek and kisses him again.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s the second time he finds himself falling asleep next to Yamaguchi, close enough to sling his arm around his waist and draw him close until his nose brushes Kei’s throat. Long after they’ve finished kissing, Yamaguchi will sleepily press his mouth to Kei’s knuckles every now and then, and Kei will comb his hair back with three fingers, leaving soft striations behind. Yamaguchi dozes easily, in and out, as if guided by a tide, but Kei is wide awake.

“You wanna know something?” Yamaguchi asks him.

“Sure,” Kei says.

“I like you because…” he murmurs. He’s clearly falling asleep; his eyes aren’t even open. Kei debates with himself over whether he looks cutest like this or some other way. “Because you’re a good person… Tsukki.”

Kei snorts into his pillow, fingers lightly brushing aside the hair over Yamaguchi’s forehead. “What makes you say that?”

Yamaguchi yawns and shifts closer, breath warming Kei’s throat. “In the car… the bug. You… you let it go. And when you saved it, you—you were looking at it with… with warm, kind eyes.”

Kei’s hand goes still. He had honestly forgotten about the tiny mayfly nymph, resting on the inner window what seems like lifetimes ago.

“Oh,” he says.

Of course he had saved it. Not even the prospect of infinite repeats would have changed his mind, then. He would do it every time.

“That was when I knew,” Yamaguchi says, “that you couldn’t be all that bad.” The next part is built so quietly that Kei isn’t fully sure if it’s there: “That you were… mm… actually kind of sweet…”

Kei kind of wants to laugh. Him— _sweet_. Not stingy, not disagreeable, not antagonistic. Not even deliberately nasty. Sweet, because he saved an insect. Somehow the notion is even more surreal than—well, than everything else.

He thinks he could be sweet every day for Yamaguchi, if he had to.

Curled under a comforter that smells like laundry soap, with Yamaguchi’s bare ankles entwined in his, listening to the storm outside begin to settle, Kei doesn’t bother thinking about what the morning will bring. He thinks about the sun, spilling down through a hundred huddled leaves, and closes his eyes.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“ _Stay with me… I knock on the door at midnight—I cried without going home—that season is now right in front of you—stay with me_ …”

Kei rolls over, pulling the quilt over his head, and tries to keep breathing. The fabric between his fingers is warm.

He crams down the disappointment before it can grow into something more painful. There’d have been no sense in getting his hopes up to begin with. Besides, if he’s really lonely he can always just go see Yamaguchi again, and—

“ _The second winter comes_ … _your heart has gone further away… if I look back, I see that I always, always felt you there_ … _stay with me_ —”

“Oh, dear! Didn’t we just play that yesterday morning, too? Well, it’s another snowy day here in Karuizawa after yesterday’s storm, and the first day of spring…”

“Tsukishima?”

Kei opens his eyes.

Yamaguchi is lying on his back beside him, one arm slung sleepily over his face.

“What time is it?” he mumbles.

“Yamaguchi.”

“Mm?”

“ _Yamaguchi_ ,” Kei repeats, choked.

Yamaguchi yawns. “What?”

Kei’s eyes dart frantically over every inch of him that he can see, each lit softly by a sliver of morning light edging in through the blinds: hair, ears, nose, throat, chest, elbow. Freckles, t-shirt, hands. _Hands_.

“You’re here,” he breathes. “Why, why are you _here_ —how—”

Yamaguchi rolls over onto his side, facing Kei, his eyes still closed.

“You said stay, so I stayed,” he mumbles.

“I said stay, so you stayed,” Kei repeats, unable to help the smile building on his face. “Who are you; Hachikō?”

Yamaguchi’s mouth slips into a fond, bleary grin, and he shoves lightly at Kei’s shoulder. “Shut up.”

“Sorry, Yamaguchi.”

Yamaguchi wrinkles his nose as Kei throws off the comforter, puts on his glasses, and stumbles to his feet, skidding slightly on the mat when he bounds to the sliding door. He lifts the blinds, surveying the scenery outside: trees, trees, and more trees—but with more snow on them than there has ever been on the morning of February 3rd.

“No way,” he whispers.

“What’s up?” Yamaguchi asks, the end of it dissolving into another yawn. Kei hears a shuffle of feet behind him and feels a weight drop onto his shoulder—Yamaguchi’s chin.

“You’re heavy,” Kei tells him. As if to prove a point, Yamaguchi slumps more fully against his back, making his knees buckle.

“Maybe you’re just weak,” Yamaguchi mumbles into his ear.

Kei drives his elbow into Yamaguchi’s stomach. It’s soft. Yamaguchi yelps and springs off of him.

“That’s not fair,” he whines, rubbing the point of impact. He lifts his other hand to shutter his eyes against the sunshine for a moment before turning around and starting to stretch.

“Breakfast?” he asks over his shoulder, and it’s all so new, _new_ , and his hair is sleep-mussed and the backs of his knees have freckles too and he’s saying _breakfast_ almost shyly, like he’s expecting Kei to say no, and as he bends over to touch his toes, his shirt slips up and exposes his back, and Kei can count the soft ridges of his vertebrae in the growing morning, and…

And Matsubara Miki is still singing.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Something’s definitely suspicious,” Hinata says, eyes narrowed to slits at the rear view mirror instead of somewhere sensible like the road.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Kei replies airily, turning to the next page of the paleontology book he’d borrowed from Yamaguchi. Beside him, Yamaguchi tries to disguise a laugh as a cough behind his fist.

Kageyama, curled grumpily in the front seat, extricates one of his crossed arms to elbow Hinata in the shoulder. “Will you watch the road, dumbass?!”

“We’re going like eight kilometers an hour, stupid!”

Kageyama pushes himself up and sticks his face directly in Hinata’s way so that he can scowl at the speedometer. “Ten.”

“That’s _like_ eight!”

Kei can’t help himself—he laughs. Hinata and Kageyama go deathly silent, turning woodenly around to stare at him like he’s just sprouted a second head. Hinata very slowly brakes the van until it creaks to a complete stop behind the idling car in front of them.

“See?” Hinata squeaks, hitting Kageyama’s arm a few times for emphasis. “ _See_?”

“Are you sick?” Kageyama asks Kei, dead serious. “Are you— _dying_?”

“Don’t die, Tsukishima,” Hinata exclaims. “You’re stingy and mean and tall like a freaky alien, but I’ll be sad if you die!”

“You _will_?” Kageyama barks.

“I’m touched,” says Kei.

Kageyama and Hinata whip their heads to Yamaguchi, gazes intense and commanding. Yamaguchi glances between the two of them and puts his hands up.

“ _I_ don’t know anything,” he says.

Hinata lets out a frustrated whine and turns with some reluctance back to the steering wheel, his fingers drumming restlessly against the leather.

It’s a clear blue morning, not a cloud for miles, the later winter sunlight dancing off of the piles of snow along the sides of the highway. They’ll reach Tokyo in a little over an hour, if Yamaguchi’s GPS is to be believed. Kei lifts his head from the pages in a lapse in focus, eyes wandering to the window. He’d forgotten that a sky could be so blue.

“Demons out, good luck in,” he finds himself murmuring.

“Hm?” Yamaguchi perks up beside him. “Did you say something?”

Kei looks over at him. He doesn’t know if it’s the light from the sunroof or the still-dazzling newness of it all, but his mango-colored windbreaker looks especially, vividly colorful. The smile filling his face is so natural and admiring that Kei feels like it ought to be aimed at a flock of birds or a view of the ocean, but instead it’s for him.

He wants to tell him, _I still remember that day when we looked at the mountains and you taught me about pride_. He wants to say, _I’ll make that miso soup you love any time that you want it_. He wants to say, laying himself bare, _Your favorite color is green_.

The line of Yamaguchi’s mouth softens, and he bows his head. His hand crawls across the seat between their legs and stops beside Kei’s, and slowly, with great care, he nudges his pinkie into Kei’s.

Air rushes into Kei’s chest, as clear and dazzling as the new sunlight gleaming on the distant mountain snow, and he figures that whatever he wants to say, now, he has time. As the traffic ahead of them breaks up, and the van gradually increases its speed, Kei keeps his hand where it is, nestled comfortably next to Yamaguchi’s in a pale block of daylight through the window, and listens to the weather report on the radio: three more days of sun in Tokyo.

 

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> I can't wait to see Tsukishima's face when he realizes that the one time he agreed to play for Kuroo's volleyball team is also the one time he can't take back. AND SPEAKING OF WHICH, PLEASE LOOK AT THIS [INCREDIBLE MASTERPIECE DRAWN BY MY GOOD AND TALENTED PAL SIOFRA](https://twitter.com/megoomy/status/1122243317016739840), who used her incredible comedic and artistic powers for THIS FIC! for ME! 
> 
> Thank you for reading! :') (And come say hi to me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/brells_)!)
> 
> P.S. I drew some [outfits](https://twitter.com/brells_/status/1113283962778976257).


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